"The crows that are predatory are something you have to deal with. For me, they also become associated with cancer cells."
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Quote collection
Shirley Geok-lin Lim quotes (page 7 of 7)
137 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The crows live in the world like you do. They are part of nature."
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"In publishing books and winning awards, it's like you've enjoyed this meal, you know, two months ago. How long can you be nourished by thinking about it? You've already ingested it, and you've excreted it, and that was two months ago. You had this fabulous meal. It's not going to keep you satiated today. You have to go out and get your next meal. For me, that's writing. I have to go out and hunt my next meal."
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"Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you."
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"Sometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem."
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"In Among the White Moon Faces, I wrote about my desire to be a writer as rooted in my obsessive hours of reading English novels and poetry. It was that spur, that desire, that pushed me to set aside love and marriage in my early twenties."
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"The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme."
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"The poem is not a physical body. It's a textual body that has life only insofar as it can act symbolically. It cannot physically act."
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"In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself."
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"These commonplace categories - wife, mother, housewife, teacher - are in fact teleological referents. They gesture to profound states of being that animate, absorb and saturate the subject, like indelible dyes spilled repeatedly over a plain fabric. No matter if the fabric is sturdy or delicate, translucent or opaque, those dyes will stain. They will color the days and years and life."
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"Poetics is a science for stammering poets."
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"I was driven, as have been many writers, both by a repulsion of the childhood home's narrow confines and a desire to reach further, to keep desiring more of a future not yet imagined and not yet written down."
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"Once you stop talking about the female body empowering itself vis-à-vis male forays or invasions or male demands or the necessity to respond to husband and son to bring the issue down to a more concrete level, the body is a different manifestation physically."
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"Heterosexuality - whichever gender you are - says that the other gender is very important to you."
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"The things that I dislike passionately, I have come to realize, are also part of me."
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"If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would."
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"The foot can march or it can dance, but it cannot stand still until end-stopped."
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