Top 137 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

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

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.

Growing up in Asia in a particular time period - the '50s and '60s - I attended a Catholic missionary school where I was taught by nuns and where consciousness of the body was repressed. Yet at the same time, the female body was a highly visible and sensitive site.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

As a female in a home with a whole bunch of brothers and being very close to my father, without a mother and later having a hostile relationship with my stepmother, there were all kinds of Freudian issues rising from possessing a female body that I had to negotiate with no guidance, and I did this negotiation almost instinctually.

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.

Poetics is a science for stammering poets.

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

"I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the desire to write poetry that kept me discontented, if not depressed and unhappy, through what many casual biographers have characterized as successful and productive decades.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Working women went through a time when they believed that.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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