Shirley Geok-lin Lim Quotes

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

I 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

One arrives at a recognition that one needs to be distracted.

I have some weak poems in that new collection, which is why I'm not ready to send the collection out yet.

I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.

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."

You've read some of the poems in this new unpublished book [Walker's Alphabet], e.g., the poem "C." I have a number of poems whose titles are letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F.

After Fifty Shades of Grey, I think my writing is pretty tame, isn't it?

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.

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!

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.

You need to be distracted.

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

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.

In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself.

Poetics is a science for stammering poets.

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

Heterosexuality - whichever gender you are - says that the other gender is very important to you.

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

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

In some ways it is absurd for me to assert, counter to evidence, that I have not been writing.

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

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.

When people say "the body," frequently they mean the literal body, the physical body.

I'm not sure why my muse is female, except when I am deliberately playing against that figure.

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

"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.

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

Note, the reply will not be "I write," an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine.

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

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

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.

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.

I do not think a similar goal, to attain fame, drove me when I was a child and young woman.

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.

Singing has nothing to do with poetry, except as twins separated at birth.

Sometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem.

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

Philosophy is a bad master for poetry; religion worse; and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.

The city and nature, the built stone and the found stone, concrete and slate, poetry addresses them all democratically.