"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."
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Quote collection
Maya Lin quotes (page 3 of 5)
81 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost."
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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."
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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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"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."
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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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"You have to have conviction and completely question everything and anything you do. No matter how much you study, no matter how much you know, the side of your brain that has the smarts won't necessarily help you in making art."
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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."
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"The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it's magical."
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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."
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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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"How we are using up our home, how we are living and polluting the planet is frightening. It was evident when I was a child. It's more evident now."
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"My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions."
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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."
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"Competitions are what you do as a good exercise."
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"My grandfather, on my father's side, helped to draft one of the first constitutions of China. He was a fairly well-known scholar."
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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 went through withdrawal when I got out of graduate school. It's what you learn, what you think. That's all that counts."
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"I always give the analogy of the Earth at Night picture, of 7.3 billion of us, right? And everyone says, "Well, that's population." Well, if you took the entire world's population and you lived at the density of Manhattan proper - not a bad place to live - how much space do 7.3 billion people take up? The state of Colorado. At which point I end my lectures, because I want you to be thinking ... is this really a question of population, or is this a question of land use and resource consumption? And let's face it, the top 1.3 billion of us are doing all the damage. Sorry."
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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."
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