Shirley Geok-lin Lim famous quotes

03-25-2025

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

#America #Justice #Generations
Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.
-- Shirley Geok-lin Lim

#Writing #Feet #Shoelaces
Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.
-- Shirley Geok-lin Lim

#Cutting #Roots #Sometimes
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

#Order #Imagination #Flight
The foot can march or it can dance, but it cannot stand still until end-stopped.
-- Shirley Geok-lin Lim

#Feet #March #Ends
If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.
-- Shirley Geok-lin Lim

#Writing #Novel #Walking
Working women went through a time when they believed that.
-- Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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

#Realizing #Dislike
As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.
-- Shirley Geok-lin Lim

#Grew #Puzzled
Heterosexuality - whichever gender you are - says that the other gender is very important to you.
-- Shirley Geok-lin Lim

#Important #Heterosexuality #Gender
Once you stop talking about the female body empowering itself vis-à-vis male forays or invasions or male demands or the necessity to respond to husband and son to bring the issue down to a more concrete level, the body is a different manifestation physically.
-- Shirley Geok-lin Lim

#Husband #Son #Issues
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

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

#Struggle #Teaching #Decline
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.
-- Shirley Geok-lin Lim

#Agency #Self #Might
I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.
-- Shirley Geok-lin Lim

#Cancer #Scare #Mortality
Poetics is a science for stammering poets.
-- Shirley Geok-lin Lim

#Poet #Stammering
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

#People #Guy #Males
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

#Mother #Teacher #Color
[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.
-- Shirley Geok-lin Lim

#Writing #Down And #Muse
In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself.
-- Shirley Geok-lin Lim

#People #Elements #Way
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

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

#Doe #Body #Female
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.
-- Shirley Geok-lin Lim

#Writing #Important #Three
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

#Thinking #Oxygen #Creative
One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.
-- Shirley Geok-lin Lim

#Feel Good #Able #Should

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