"Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way."
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Quote collection
Shirley Geok-lin Lim quotes (page 2 of 7)
137 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
""Stop Already" is a fairly new poem in a group that was just published by Feminist Studies, which is why I sent them to you."
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"What happens when a female writer invokes a female muse? Does something else happen? With Sappho's figures of desire, we have a different lesbian energy."
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"I had to do the academic writing. At a top research university, publishing of a certain kind is very important. So your friend is right. You can't do three things well."
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"John Milton famously claimed, "Fame is the spur" for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur."
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"In recent poems, I have abandoned the theme of not being able to write for an even more obsessive subject, the nature of language, particularly English, in the formation of my imagination and being."
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"Rather, the collapsing between act and condition, "I am" with "I do," feels like authenticity, an authenticity of being. The muse rewarded me for a few months, after April of 2012, by giving me poems, almost a poem each day, that I can claim as coming from my writer's status."
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"Note, the reply will not be "I write," an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine."
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"Even my novels offer passages in which the major character is imagined as a writer. In Joss and Gold, Li An is a business writer who edits her company's weekly public relations magazine. And in Sister Swing, Suyin writes human interest stories for a free, local community paper, The Asian Time."
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"In some ways it is absurd for me to assert, counter to evidence, that I have not been writing."
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"That desire to reach further is also where I ended my memoir, in 1994 in California, perhaps ironically, looking out to the Pacific and back to Asia, toward the not-yet-written."
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"I do not think a similar goal, to attain fame, drove me when I was a child and young woman."
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"Of course, among the confused motives that spurred me toward being a writer was also the desire to look, to be above the trees and rooftops, beyond the Malaysian horizon that circumscribed my life."
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"I really felt neurotic - it was a neurotic reason - but I had to teach very, very well. That sucked up a lot of oxygen from my time and my creative thinking."
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"One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it."
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"Quite a while ago, I made a conscious choice to place my teaching first, so it was very ego-invested. That decision wasn't a good thing in some ways."
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"My muse is very often, in my mind, a nagger. She nags me."
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"I'm always resisting [my muse]. I'm resisting her power."
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"I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet."
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""I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the desire to write poetry that kept me discontented, if not depressed and unhappy, through what many casual biographers have characterized as successful and productive decades."
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