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I was always making things. Even though art was what I did every day, it didn't even occur to me that I would be an artist.

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
Would
Making
Artist
Art
Didn
Even
Every
Always
Occur
Things
Though

More quotes by Maya Lin

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Every memorial in its time has a different goal.
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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.
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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.
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To fly, we must have resistance.
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For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.
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It terrified me to have an idea that was solely mine to be no longer a part of my mind, but totally public.
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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.
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I also wanted remembering the past relevant to the present. Some people wanted me to put the names in alphabetical order. I wanted them in chronological order so that a veteran could find his time within the panel. It's like a thread of life.
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Math, it's a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles.
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To fly we have to have resistance.
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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.
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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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Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.
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If we forget what used to be, then we’ve lost an ability to really be sensitive to our surroundings.
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My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.
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I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.
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I begin by imagining an artwork verbally. I try to describe in writing what the project is, what it is trying to do. I need to understand the artwork without giving it a specific materiality or solid form.
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The role of art in society differs for every artist.
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Architecture is like a mythical fantastic. It has to be experienced. It can't be described. We can draw it up and we can make models of it, but it can only be experienced as a complete whole.
Maya Lin
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If you don't remember history accurately, how can you learn?
Maya Lin