Shirley Geok-lin Lim Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Working women went through a time when they believed that.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Poetics is a science for stammering poets.

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.

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

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

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.