"I was nine when I first knew I wanted to be a writer, in particular, a poet."
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Shirley Geok-lin Lim quotes (page 5 of 7)
137 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"In actual fact, I have been an academic - a college and university teacher and scholar - for much of the last 45 years, and only rarely a writer."
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"When I spoke at the 2012 Contemporary Women Writers' Conference in Taipei, I thought it offered an appropriate moment and site to announce my new manifesto10 and profession - to be a writer."
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"The Chinese traditionally have revered age and longevity - I have one and hope for the other! - so, in Taipei, a city-hub for global Chinese who dis-identify with the People's Republic of China's construction of a Communist nationalist Chineseness, I called on the Chinese muse of writing to witness my emergence out of the academic woods."
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"Some Asian American male scholars have claimed this muse to be Guong Goong, God of Literature, and, simultaneously, although not coincidentally or triflingly, God of War, but I did not have such a gendered muse in mind then."
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"My recent retirement from full-time teaching to the status of research professor at University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB) encouraged me to come out, so to speak."
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"The inimitable writer Maxine Hong Kingston published a book in 2002 with the title To Be the Poet. However, in contrast to the transformatory distinctions Kingston makes between the conditions of being a prose writer and "the poet," my multigenre impulses incline me to a broader transformation: to be a writer."
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"The city and nature, the built stone and the found stone, concrete and slate, poetry addresses them all democratically."
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"No matter how sheltered [my students] are, no matter how their parents try to do right by them, every single one of them, you know, every single one of us, that's what we all face. And so it's made me - that's the one change I've marked in myself - it's made me change in the way I relate to my students. I've become a different teacher in that way."
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"I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough."
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"I look at my young students, and I no longer have the sense that, oh, I'm the authority and they have to meet a certain standard. It's like, oh, look at these young ones. They've got such a hard road in front of them. I don't envy them having life ahead of them."
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"The one difference I have noted is that it's made me more tender to my students and to young people particularly. It's made me mellower. I began to have a different perspective, because I may not be around much longer to be hassled by life's pressures."
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"[Cancer] didn't make me more intense about not working more and just having fun more. It didn't do that either."
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"In a way, this kind of insight or recognition often permeates the way I think of character, how I plot action, and the way in which I use imagery, seeing binaries as false."
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"I came to realize this weird projection: you are much more passionate about hating something outside of you when you know that something is also in you."
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"Wouldn't that be wonderful if I could do that? And that way, I could walk with the muse, rather than walk without her. The novel would write itself."
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"I was writing poems as I was walking. I was able to take that restlessness, that nomadic distraction, and use that distraction in the world and turn that distraction into observations and then into poems."
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"I don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless."
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"In that way, I don't understand myself. It might have to do with my own conflicts, where to place my body as a child, which I have carried over to now. In this way I'm constantly dislocated."
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"It's why muse is so impatient with me. I don't ever go to her until after the teaching or whatever is over."
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