"I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me."
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Quote collection
Maya Lin quotes (page 1 of 5)
81 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"In art or architecture your project is only done when you say it's done. If you want to rip it apart at the eleventh hour and start all over again, you never finish. I was one of those crazy creatures."
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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."
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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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"A lot of my works deal with a passage, which is about time. I don't see anything that I do as a static object in space. It has to exist as a journey in time."
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"I probably have fundamentally antisocial tendencies. I never took one extracurricular activity. I just failed utterly at that level. Part of me still rebels against that."
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"To fly we have to have resistance."
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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."
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"Our lives are given meaning by our actions-accomplishments made while we are "here" that extend beyond our own time."
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"I also wanted remembering the past relevant to the present. Some people wanted me to put the names in alphabetical order. I wanted them in chronological order so that a veteran could find his time within the panel. It's like a thread of life."
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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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"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 didn't have anyone to play with so I made up my own world."
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"OK, it was black, it was below grade, I was female, Asian American, young, too young to have served. Yet I think none of the opposition in that sense hurt me."
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"Growing up, I thought I was white. It didn't occur to me I was Asian-American until I was studying abroad in Denmark and there was a little bit of prejudice."
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"To me, the American Dream is being able to follow your own personal calling. To be able to do what you want to do is incredible freedom."
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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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"If we can't face death, we'll never overcome it. You have to look it straight in the eye. Then you can turn around and walk back out into the light."
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"I like to think of my work as creating a private conversation with each person, no matter how public each work is and no matter how many people are present"
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"All my work is much more peaceful than I am."
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