110+ Shirley Geok-lin Lim Quotes On Education, Poetic And Feminist

Shirley Geok-lin Lim is an American writer and professor of English and Women's Studies. She is best known for her poetry, short stories, novels, and essays that explore the experiences of Chinese-American women. She has won numerous awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the American Book Award, and the Pushcart Prize. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim on love, education, life.

Top 10 Shirley Geok-lin Lim Quotes

1. Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.
2. As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.
3. [My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.
4. Working women went through a time when they believed that.
5. Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks.
6. Now that I'm more middle class, I have access to consumer goods. I do enjoy feminine frippery, feminine doo-da, stuff like that.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim Short Quotes

• If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.
• Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.
• "Time" does not mean "occasion."
• I'm surrounded by men, and the muse is complaining that I have neglected her.
• Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.
• I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.
• I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet.
• Heterosexuality - whichever gender you are - says that the other gender is very important to you.
• I always wanted to be pretty as a girl, although I believed it was not possible.
• I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim Quotes About Love

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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

Shirley Geok-lin Lim Quotes About Life

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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." — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

In short, for me - I'm kind of projecting onto you - distraction has become a modus vivendi, a way of life. Rather than complaining, I am recognizing that I couldn't do what I wanted to do because I'm distracted. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Of course, among the confused motives that spurred me toward being a writer was also the desire to look, to be above the trees and rooftops, beyond the Malaysian horizon that circumscribed my life. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Shirley Geok-lin Lim Quotes About Poetic

Poetics is a science for stammering poets. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Signs of a maddening system of writing and counting that calibrates the values of something the poet does not yet know. Praxis is therefore poetics. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself; it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Shirley Geok-lin Lim Famous Quotes And Sayings

As a first-generation "Asian American woman," for one thing, I knew there was no such thing as an "Asian American woman." Within this homogenizing labeling of an exotica, I knew there were entire racial/national/cultural/sexual-preferenced groups, many of whom find each other as alien as mainstream America apparently finds me. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Particularly 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 Lim

Even my novels offer passages in which the major character is imagined as a writer. In Joss and Gold, Li An is a business writer who edits her company's weekly public relations magazine. And in Sister Swing, Suyin writes human interest stories for a free, local community paper, The Asian Time. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I don't like crows. In the poem "C," crows are predatory, killing other birds and so forth. But in my morning walks, there were always crows, particularly at certain times of the year. And they're very aggressive, very visible and loud. They're not at all likable, but they have to be dealt with. They are part of the picture, the art in the morning. You cannot deny their reality. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

When people say "the body," frequently they mean the literal body, the physical body. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Breath and brevity are sisters; the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I guess my writing through time has focused on a number of dimensions that reflect separately on the meaning and social place of the female body. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

People called me a tomboy. That was the term used then. I was very much someone who was comfortable in male clothing, and even later when I grew up, I was constantly wearing dungarees, wearing guy shirts. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

The crows live in the world like you do. They are part of nature. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

According to [Maxine Hong] Kingston, the prose writer is "a workhorse." — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I'm always resisting [my muse]. I'm resisting her power. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

The things that I dislike passionately, I have come to realize, are also part of me. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

In the poem "C," the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I also wanted to be like my brothers, physically, and yet not physically. So I would constantly - and I think nowadays it's taken for granted that this is what girlfriends do - I would constantly wear their shorts, put on their shirts. That did not seem odd because we were desperately poor for quite a while. It wasn't as if pretty little girlie things were available to me. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

It is true that my characters have sex. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

In recent poems, I have abandoned the theme of not being able to write for an even more obsessive subject, the nature of language, particularly English, in the formation of my imagination and being. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Sometimes, in my published complaints about not being a writer, I have recalled the prospect - the yearning to be a writer - as it first formed for me. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

What happens when a female writer invokes a female muse? Does something else happen? With Sappho's figures of desire, we have a different lesbian energy. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

This condition [irony] has nothing to do with writer's block, a psychological syndrome, which is one of the few I have not diagnosed for myself! — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

With so many brothers, I could always find a pair of shorts to borrow and run around in. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no rain for decades. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

The city and nature, the built stone and the found stone, concrete and slate, poetry addresses them all democratically. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

After Fifty Shades of Grey, I think my writing is pretty tame, isn't it? — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

[Cancer] didn't make me more intense about not working more and just having fun more. It didn't do that either.  — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

It's why muse is so impatient with me. I don't ever go to her until after the teaching or whatever is over. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I have some weak poems in that new collection, which is why I'm not ready to send the collection out yet. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I want, I want, I want! We never grow out of it somehow. Unless we become Buddhists, maybe. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

"Stop Already" is a fairly new poem in a group that was just published by Feminist Studies, which is why I sent them to you. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

My muse is very often, in my mind, a nagger. She nags me. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Saul Bellow has that character in Henderson the Rain King say: "I want, I want, I want!"9 I remember reading this passage years ago and thinking, yes, that's the human. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

No one, evidently, except me has found "No Alarms" poem ironical that an obsessive theme in my writing was - and has continued to be - not being able to write. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I do not think a similar goal, to attain fame, drove me when I was a child and young woman. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

When someone asks me now, "What do you do?" I will be able to say, "I am a writer." — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

There are a couple of poems I've written with masculine muses, very often the muse to me is a female. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

In various memoir pieces, I have traced the trajectory of yearning through decisions made, good and bad, that had somehow kept the ambition on track. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

The body in defense against male appropriation expresses itself through work in writing, and the work in writing produces the book. So it's a different form of creation and generation that may be viewed as creation without male contribution as a component or challenge. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Note, the reply will not be "I write," an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I did not write about that kind of insecurity and anxiety between myself and my brothers, because my father was the dominant male figure as I was growing up in that home. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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 Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

If you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

One arrives at a recognition that one needs to be distracted. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

The judges who awarded the 1980 Commonwealth Poetry Prize to my first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems, cited with approval and with no apparent conscious irony my early poem, "No Alarms." The poem was composed probably sometime in 1974 or 1975, and it complained about the impossibility of writing poetry - of being a poet - under the conditions in which I was living then. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

If the act of writing is the act of putting aside the masculine, then you might in that way, it may sound almost crazy to say this, say that the act of writing, for a woman, could be a homosexual act. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

In some ways it is absurd for me to assert, counter to evidence, that I have not been writing. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

I'm not sure why my muse is female, except when I am deliberately playing against that figure. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Life Lessons by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

1. Shirley Geok-lin Lim's work emphasizes the importance of understanding and respecting cultural and racial differences. She encourages readers to explore their own cultural heritage and to recognize the value of different perspectives.
2. Through her writing, Lim demonstrates the power of storytelling to bridge cultural divides and to create meaningful connections between people.
3. Her work emphasizes the importance of self-reflection and the need to challenge our own preconceptions in order to create a more tolerant and inclusive society.