"Even after the mothering dropped because my son grew up, the writing - the muse - was always the third wheel, the lowest on the priority list."
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Shirley Geok-lin Lim quotes (page 6 of 7)
137 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The poem might come to you as you're preparing to teach a lecture, right? And when you say, "no" to that occasion, that poem is gone."
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"I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me."
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"For a while they wore suits or pants suits, and pants suits are kind of a women's appropriation of male costume, work costume. For me, it wasn't Western feminism or the Western workspace. It was my growing up in a house with a bunch of boys, so that male costuming just became my mode of appropriation way before, you know, Betty Friedan came along."
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"I'm much more comfortable in pants and shirts, running around. There was a typical construction about womanhood when I was growing up that I rejected."
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"I'm nomadic. Even when I'm a visiting professor here at the City University of Hong Kong, in this campus flat, I'm constantly getting up, sitting down, picking this or that up. You can't do that and be a writer. You need to be able to sit still."
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"You need to be distracted."
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"I have some weak poems in that new collection, which is why I'm not ready to send the collection out yet."
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"I only submit the poems I think are the strongest."
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"I do want to do the entire alphabet. There's in [Walker's Alphabet] a poem called "A Life" in that grouping. I was going to change that title to "A.""
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"You've read some of the poems in this new unpublished book [Walker's Alphabet], e.g., the poem "C." I have a number of poems whose titles are letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F."
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"This distraction is what one wants, which is very, very bad for the muse, because the muse hates not being in the line of sight. It's no longer an external conflict, like, oh, I have all these demands and I don't like them. The split is in the self. This may explain why, when I was in Santa Barbara before I went to Singapore and then now to Hong Kong, there was a writing moment when I was writing a poem a day. I had never done that before."
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"When I was younger, yes, there was a part of me - and I wrote about that bit in Among the White Moon Faces - that wanted to be a boy. I wanted to be accepted by my brothers and to be their peers."
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"In the poem "C," the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare."
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"Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive presence. I figure them differently."
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"I can't imagine otherwise - I guess Virginia Woolf could write wonderful novels where the women never have sex, and her novels work. But for me, I don't think I could write a plot without sex happening somewhere."
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"It is true that my characters have sex."
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"In Sister Swing, the two sisters have boyfriends and they go to bed with them, but the descriptions are not graphic. They're minimal. The sex is not graphic in the way that DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover has all these graphic passages."
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"After Fifty Shades of Grey, I think my writing is pretty tame, isn't it?"
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"I had a couple of Asian readers and other folks tell me, "Oh, you have a lot of sex in your writing.""
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