"If you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over."
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Shirley Geok-lin Lim quotes (page 3 of 7)
137 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I think that's what, to me, also talks about the silences in my work - as a woman, a woman writer, when you say, "no" or you have to say, "no" so often to the writing occasion, those occasions don't really come back."
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""Time" does not mean "occasion.""
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"According to [Maxine Hong] Kingston, the prose writer is "a workhorse.""
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"When people say "the body," frequently they mean the literal body, the physical body."
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"Is there a term that one might use rather than say that one is homosexual? Is there a different physical gender and symbolic dimension? I'm thinking of Adrienne Rich's notion of the lesbian spectrum. It's not as if sexual identity is binary: one must be either homo or hetero."
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"When I write, I put aside the heterosexual world to admit a muse that is a woman-loving-woman female."
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"When you're a female poet, would you, therefore, invoke a male muse? When nuns get consecrated into their vocations, they become brides of Christ. Christ is the bridegroom. In these symbolic actions, rather than in physical actions, where a male reaches sexuality or participates in intimate exchanges, if one uses a different term - there's often a heterosexual figuring that takes place. The male poet invokes a beautiful female muse. The virginal nun consecrated invokes the male bridegroom, Christ."
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"If the act of writing is the act of putting aside the masculine, then you might in that way, it may sound almost crazy to say this, say that the act of writing, for a woman, could be a homosexual act."
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"From the world of the muse and writing, there will come, hopefully, the book. You're right, for me, that the muse is always female, and the book comes from a separate gender dimension than the concrete male world that, as you pointed out, has been surrounding me since I was an infant."
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"Breath and brevity are sisters; the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat."
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"Singing has nothing to do with poetry, except as twins separated at birth."
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"It's as if I'm setting aside the husband and son, you know, the patriarchal world, for the world of the muse. This is the world of writing."
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"I'm surrounded by men, and the muse is complaining that I have neglected her."
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"The body in defense against male appropriation expresses itself through work in writing, and the work in writing produces the book. So it's a different form of creation and generation that may be viewed as creation without male contribution as a component or challenge."
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"I'm not sure why my muse is female, except when I am deliberately playing against that figure."
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"There are a couple of poems I've written with masculine muses, very often the muse to me is a female."
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"I guess my writing through time has focused on a number of dimensions that reflect separately on the meaning and social place of the female body."
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"Growing up in Asia in a particular time period - the '50s and '60s - I attended a Catholic missionary school where I was taught by nuns and where consciousness of the body was repressed. Yet at the same time, the female body was a highly visible and sensitive site."
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"The consciousness of one's physical self had to be repressed because, socially, the female body was so visible, an ongoing provocation and incitement of specular curiosity and fascination."
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