I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
If you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
No matter how sheltered [my students] are, no matter how their parents try to do right by them, every single one of… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
For a while they wore suits or pants suits, and pants suits are kind of a women's appropriation of male costume, work… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I came to realize this weird projection: you are much more passionate about hating something outside of you when you know that… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
It's as if I'm setting aside the husband and son, you know, the patriarchal world, for the world of the muse. This… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Signs of a maddening system of writing and counting that calibrates the values of something the poet does not yet know. Praxis… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
In publishing books and winning awards, it's like you've enjoyed this meal, you know, two months ago. How long can you be… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Now that I'm more middle class, I have access to consumer goods. I do enjoy feminine frippery, feminine doo-da, stuff like that. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
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… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
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… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Even after the mothering dropped because my son grew up, the writing - the muse - was always the third wheel, the lowest on… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
If you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
"I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the desire to… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
People called me a tomboy. That was the term used then. I was very much someone who was comfortable in male clothing, and even… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image