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Quote by Boey Kim Cheng

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Clear Brightness

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Boey Kim Cheng

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“It is the teacher's and the lawmaker's responsibility to allow the child to express his feelings about growing up. What happens to a child at that particular age? It is a terribly vulnerable time, and if we provide youths with an environment to be free, to be expressive, without embarrassing them, without shaming them, they would grow up to be healthy, compassionate adults. Instead, if we force them to “belong, belong, belong,” they all become repressed. There is a complete absence of options.”

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Author:Cyril Wong
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“The sensation of the ocean bearing my weight was the most carefree lightness I’d ever experienced. When we were halfway across the strait, the sound of an engine approached from a distance—it was probably the police coast guard. We quickly ducked under the surface of the water, exposing only the tips of our trunks so we could breathe.”

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Book:The Earnest Mask
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“There was once an abbot who had spent thirty-nine years alone in the temple with cats as his only companions. As someone who believed that faith and willpower could conquer any difficulty, the abbot began training newborn kittens, trying to turn the impossible into the possible. First he put the rattan hoop on the ground for the kittens to crawl through. Then he slowly raised the hoop little by little, day after day, month after month, and year after year. Years went by and the hoop was gradually raised until he finally succeeded in getting the cats to jump through the hoop. An unusual phenomenon occurred. When the kittens saw the older cats jump, they believed they could do it too and so, without much effort, they learned to jump easily through the hoop as well.”

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Book:Teaching Cats to Jump Hoops
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“The day the earth-moving machines arrived, it was as if aliens had invaded Earth. Overnight they appeared, diggers with huge scoops, plodding their slow and ancient ways across the landscape. By the next week they had multiplied and evolved into diverse forms—cranes with long arms, bulldozers and levellers, an assortment of lorries. All day they worked towards some unseen design, creating and removing debris, their latticework of tracks remaking and writing over the space. Untenanted and vulnerable, the attap huts offered no resistance.”

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Book:Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume One
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“In writing I try to pare down the descriptive bits. If I feel that I could say something in as few words as possible, then I would rather do it than to go on padding. One should describe sufficiently to give the reader a sense of what one feels, but not at the same time overwhelm the reader in any way. For example, I feel that if you use lots of adjectives they have a mutually cancelling effect. If you can describe a scene well enough, without having to use far too many words, I would rather do so.”

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Author:Arthur Yap
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