Body Quote by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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

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

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

I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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

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

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

"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

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

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems.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

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