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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
Politics
Eclipsed
Read
Veterans
War
Memorial
Artist
Veteran
Felt
Deliberately
Anything
Irrelevant
Vietnam
Happened

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If you don't remember history accurately, how can you learn?
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The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.
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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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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.
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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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For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.
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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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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.
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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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You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down.
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