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.
Shirley Geok-lin LimJohn Milton famously claimed, "Fame is the spur" for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur.
Shirley Geok-lin LimThe 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.
Shirley Geok-lin LimParticularly in relationship to my father - there's something that daughters, girl children, do almost instinctually in their relationships with their father, so that physically, those boundaries must be respected and never crossed.
Shirley Geok-lin LimI 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.
Shirley Geok-lin LimFor 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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim