Shirley Geok-lin Lim Quotes

Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.

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.

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.

As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.

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

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

[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.

I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.

Working women went through a time when they believed that.

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

With so many brothers, I could always find a pair of shorts to borrow and run around in.

Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks.

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.

Quite a while ago, I made a conscious choice to place my teaching first, so it was very ego-invested. That decision wasn't a good thing in some ways.

According to [Maxine Hong] Kingston, the prose writer is "a workhorse."

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.

Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.

"Time" does not mean "occasion."

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

I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.

I'm always resisting [my muse]. I'm resisting her power.

I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet.

I don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless.

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

My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.

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.

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

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.

As the only girl growing up for a long time with only boys, as you pointed out, it seems like I was always surrounded by guys. There was this sense in which my female body was a problem.

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 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.

Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way.

The crows that are predatory are something you have to deal with. For me, they also become associated with cancer cells.

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.

In the poem "C," the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare.

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.

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.

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

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.

I was nine when I first knew I wanted to be a writer, in particular, a poet.

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.

[Cancer] didn't make me more intense about not working more and just having fun more. It didn't do that either.

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

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.

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.

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.

One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.

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.

I had to do the academic writing. At a top research university, publishing of a certain kind is very important. So your friend is right. You can't do three things well.

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.