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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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Maya Lin
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 5
Architect
Designer
Land Artist
Landscape Architect
Printmaker
Sculptor
Athens
Ohio
Maya Ying Lin
Artist
Veteran
Felt
Deliberately
Anything
Irrelevant
Vietnam
Happened
Politics
Eclipsed
Read
Veterans
War
Memorial

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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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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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Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think.
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You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down.
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When I was building the Vietnam Memorial, I never once asked the veterans what it was like in the war, because from my point of view, you don't pry into other people's business.
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For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.
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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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Math, it's a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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To fly, we must have resistance.
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To fly we have to have resistance.
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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.
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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.
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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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My dad was dean of fine arts at the university. I was casting bronzes in the school foundry. I was using the university as a playground.
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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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