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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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Maya Lin
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 5
Architect
Designer
Land Artist
Landscape Architect
Printmaker
Sculptor
Athens
Ohio
Maya Ying Lin
Chinese
Letters
China
Family
Littles
Little
Insular
Would
Censored
More quotes by Maya Lin
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.
Maya Lin
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.
Maya Lin
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
You have to let the viewers come away with their own conclusions. If you dictate what they should think, you've lost it.
Maya Lin
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
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
It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it.
Maya Lin
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
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.
Maya Lin
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
The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.
Maya Lin
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
Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think.
Maya Lin
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
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
To fly we have to have resistance.
Maya Lin
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
If we forget what used to be, then we’ve lost an ability to really be sensitive to our surroundings.
Maya Lin
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.
Maya Lin
For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.
Maya Lin
