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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
School
Chemistry
Really
Teachers
Things
Enjoyed
Would
Liked
Blow
Stay
Teacher
Explosives
Making
Hanging

More quotes by Maya Lin

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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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Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.
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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.
Maya Lin
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It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it.
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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.
Maya Lin
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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.
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 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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For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.
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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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
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When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family.
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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If you don't remember history accurately, how can you learn?
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 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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My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.
Maya Lin
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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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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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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