Shirley Geok-lin Lim Quotes

When someone asks me now, "What do you do?" I will be able to say, "I am a writer."

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.

I was not - even the notion of "could not" seems to suggest a moment of recognition, but it was such a repressed dimension - I was not able to NOT wear a shirt like my brothers could. My brothers would, in the heat, run around shirtless, and I wouldn't do that, obviously.

Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.

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.

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.

Poetics is a science for stammering poets.

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.

Breath and brevity are sisters; the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat.

I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.

I want, I want, I want! We never grow out of it somehow. Unless we become Buddhists, maybe.

The foot can march or it can dance, but it cannot stand still until end-stopped.

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.

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.

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.

When I write, I put aside the heterosexual world to admit a muse that is a woman-loving-woman female.

Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems.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.

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."

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.

The crows live in the world like you do. They are part of nature.

If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.

Emerging into writership, I have plans to discover my other themes, of nation and country, love and conflict, the body and transcendence, mutilation and wholeness, starvation and wicked plenty, and more. That is, I am already thinking ahead to more writing.

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.

At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen.

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.

There are a couple of poems I've written with masculine muses, very often the muse to me is a female.

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.

The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.

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.

The things that I dislike passionately, I have come to realize, are also part of me.

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.

If you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over.

I was walking every morning, and I'd take my iPod and paper and pen. As I walked, I wrote a poem, and then I'd come home - and sometimes it's legible, sometimes not - I typed the poem up. So I have a new, yet to be published, collection of poems now. It's called Walker's Alphabet, and among other things, it is about walking. My most recent collection of poems in 2010, incidentally, was titled WALKING backwards.

"Time" does not mean "occasion."

Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.

I'm surrounded by men, and the muse is complaining that I have neglected her.

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.

[Irony] has everything to do with what Tillie Olsen so powerfully imagined in her short story, "As I Stand Here Ironing" and elaborates on polemically in her 1978 book, Silences, in a chapter first delivered as a talk in 1967. As Olsen clearly saw it for women, my not being a writer was a material consequence of my being a woman - a wife, mother, housewife, and a certain kind of feminist teacher - attentive, one-on-one, face-to-face, nurturing, the kind who receives high ESCI evaluation scores from undergraduates and graduate students.

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.

My muse is very often, in my mind, a nagger. She nags me.

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.

I always wanted to be pretty as a girl, although I believed it was not possible.

Now that I'm more middle class, I have access to consumer goods. I do enjoy feminine frippery, feminine doo-da, stuff like that.

Agency over one's sexual self - and the articulation of that kind of agency - might seem transgressive to readers who don't expect it in a woman's text.

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.

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.

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.

I had a couple of Asian readers and other folks tell me, "Oh, you have a lot of sex in your writing."