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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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Maya Lin
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 5
Architect
Designer
Land Artist
Landscape Architect
Printmaker
Sculptor
Athens
Ohio
Maya Ying Lin
Teacher
Explosives
Making
Hanging
School
Chemistry
Really
Teachers
Things
Enjoyed
Would
Liked
Blow
Stay

More quotes by Maya Lin

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My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.
Maya Lin
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Math, it's a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles.
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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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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.
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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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You really can't function as a celebrity. Entertainers are celebrities. I'm an architect. I'm an artist. I make things.
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'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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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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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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To fly, we must have resistance.
Maya Lin
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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.
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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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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We were unusually brought up there was no gender differentiation. I was never thought of as any less than my brother.
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 started studying what the nature of a monument is and what a monument should be. And for the World War III memorial I designed a futile, almost terrifying passage that ends nowhere.
Maya Lin
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Sometimes I think creativity is magic it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.
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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An artist fights to retain the integrity of a work so that it remains a strong, clear vision. Art is and should be the act of an individual willing to say something new, something not quite familiar.
Maya Lin