Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Cyril Wong

Quote by Cyril Wong

“What does it mean to write a story of your own life in your head? We all do that whether we are writers or not. We all have a story about who we are: what gender we are, what experiences we have . . . all sorts of stories and narratives we allow ourselves to believe in and create as we go along.”

Quote by Cyril Wong

Create image

Author

Cyril Wong

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Cyril Wong. more

You May Also Like

“Looking back on my life, I’d say I am grateful to my two sons for having brought me up. It could not have been easy—for them or for their father. For me it was a “Poetry Workshop,” a way of doing poetry by another means (in no sense a continuation of Iowa)—as well as the sort of upbringing I never got from my mother. As luck would have it, I had a poet, a classical poet, for a mother. She didn’t write free verse; she wrote poetry until the last years of her life in the classical Chinese style. So a lot of work was done for me—when you imbibe Tang and Sung poets with a mother who chanted verses on the balcony in the moonlight.”

PoetrySingapore
Author:Wong May
Create image

“Kuala Lumpur had a certain something… There was a sense of freedom perhaps, of anarchy even, that Singapore so sorely lacked. Perhaps it was the lack of deference to authority, the physical space, the ability to take a step back and enjoy a moment of quite that lent Kuala Lumpur its atmosphere. Singaporeans were always adding to the list of reasons each one kept to hand, in case they met a Malaysian, of why it was so much better on the island than the peninsula. They ranged from law and order to cleanliness, from clean government to good schools, and always ended on the strength of the Singaporean economy. But in the end, the Malaysian would nod as if to agree to the points made – and then shrug to indicate that they probably wouldn’t trade passports, not really. And if pressed for a reason they would fall back on that old chestnut which somehow seemed to capture everything that was wrong about Singapore – but your government bans chewing gum. The nanny state and the police state all rolled into one.”

SingaporeMalaysia
Book:A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder
Create image

“Soon I find myself squatting on the floor. I am still striking my face; not with my fists this time, but with wide-open hands. I am slapping myself. The sounds I make when my palms meet my cheeks are like an unrelenting round of applause. I am clapping myself. Or clapping for myself. I start to giggle. All the voices are receding now. I am no longer filled with rage or disappointment. I clap and clap and simply cannot stop.”

FictionMental IllnessShort StoriesSingaporeCyril Wong
Book:Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me and Other Stories
Create image

“Perhaps she moves too slowly now, or the world moves too fast for her. She enters the lift, a giant wheel turns and steel cables lower the mechanized box. The lift drops down a black shaft, which exists at the heart of each HDB block. The country may be described, not as a place covered with blocks of public housing, but a topography where black vertical shafts, some forty storeys tall, rise out of the ground like trees.”

FictionShort StoriesSingaporeFlash Fiction
Book:The Space Between the Raindrops
Create image