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Every memorial in its time has a different goal.

Maya Lin

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Maya Lin
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 5
Architect
Designer
Land Artist
Landscape Architect
Printmaker
Sculptor
Athens
Ohio
Maya Ying Lin
Memorial
Goal
Different
Every
Time

More quotes by Maya Lin

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It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it.
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You should be having more fun in high school, exploring things because you want to explore them and learning because you love learning-not worrying about competition.
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To fly, we have to have resistance. It's all about turbulence. Reacting to images of wave patterns in fluid motion.
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You really can't function as a celebrity. Entertainers are celebrities. I'm an architect. I'm an artist. I make things.
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You have to let the viewers come away with their own conclusions. If you dictate what they should think, you've lost it.
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Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.
Maya Lin
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My goal is to strip things down so that you need just the right amount of words or shape to convey what you need to convey. I like editing. I like it very tight.
Maya Lin
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You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down.
Maya Lin
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I left science, then I went into art, but I approach things very analytically. I choose to pursue both art and architecture as completely separate fields rather than merging them.
Maya Lin
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I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was.
Maya Lin
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Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think.
Maya Lin
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I though about what death is, what a loss is. A sharp pain that lessens with time, but can never quite heal over. A scar. The idea occurred to me there on the site. Take a knife and cut open the earth, and with time the grass would heal it. As if you cut open the rock and polished it.
Maya Lin
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I had very few friends. We always ate dinner with our parents. We didn't want to go out. American adolescence was a lot wilder than I would have felt comfortable with.
Maya Lin
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I saw the Vietnam Veterans Memorial not as an object placed into the earth but as a cut in the earth that has then been polished, like a geode. Interest in the land and concern about how we are polluting the air and water of the planet are what make me want to travel back in geologic time-to witness the shaping of the earth before man.
Maya Lin
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For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.
Maya Lin
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To fly we have to have resistance.
Maya Lin
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I really enjoyed hanging out with some of the teachers. This one chemistry teacher, she liked hanging out. I liked making explosives. We would stay after school and blow things up.
Maya Lin
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Even though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don't want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist.
Maya Lin
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I'm as much interested in the form-making as well as getting you to think about what we're doing to the world around us.
Maya Lin
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I always say I'm no different than a 19th-century landscape painter, it's just that we have these incredible tools to look at the Earth and look at the world around us differently.
Maya Lin