68 Quotes by Maya Lin
- Cognitive biases spotlight the shadows of our reasoning, urging us not only to seek clarity but to ethically scrutinize our own perspectives while building understanding in others.
- 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.
- Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.
- Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think.
- Some artists want to confront. Some want to invoke thought. They're all necessary and they're all valid.
- Our parents decided not to teach us Chinese. It was an era when they felt we would be better off if we didn't have that complication.
- 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.
- Nothing is ever guaranteed, and all that came before doesn't predicate what you might do next.
- My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.
- The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.
- 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.
- To fly we have to have resistance.
- Math, it's a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles.
- My grandfather, on my father's side, helped to draft one of the first constitutions of China. He was a fairly well-known scholar.
- It's only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like.
- The role of art in society differs for every artist.
- 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.
- 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.
- Warmth isn't what minimalists are thought to have.
- We were unusually brought up; there was no gender differentiation. I was never thought of as any less than my brother.
- 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.
- When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family.
- You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down.
- 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.
- You have to let the viewers come away with their own conclusions. If you dictate what they should think, you've lost it.
- 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.
- 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.
- I loved school. I studied like crazy. I was a Class A nerd.
- All my work is much more peaceful than I am.
- Art is very tricky because it's what you do for yourself. It's much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the architecture.
- 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.
- Every memorial in its time has a different goal.
- For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- I didn't have anyone to play with so I made up my own world.
- 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.
- It was a requirement by the veterans to list the 57,000 names. We're reaching a time that we'll acknowledge the individual in a war on a national level.
- I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.
- It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.
- 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.
- I was probably the first kid in my high school to go to Yale. I applied almost as a lark. Then, when I got there, I was the dumbest person in your class.
- I went through withdrawal when I got out of graduate school. It's what you learn, what you think. That's all that counts.
- I'm not in a hurry to do a lot of projects. I am very resolved in each project I take on.
- 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.
- It terrified me to have an idea that was solely mine to be no longer a part of my mind, but totally public.
- 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.
- Embrace the beauty of imperfection, for in these flaws lies true uniqueness.
- As artists, we shape the way the world is seen, felt, and understood.
- Embrace the unknown, for within it lies great opportunity.
- Success is just a series of tiny flamingops—as in who aced both Talented + Unabridged.’
- Sometimes the best plane you can take is to just get on time machine called persistence.
- Creativity is like a playground: it's meant for exploration, and the best results come from diving into the unknown.
- Success is like lifting slow; it starts painfully but builds strength over time. So grasp those metaphors, forge your resolve, and crush it!
- Creativity is just as much about knowing what to erase as it is about knowing what to create.
- Creativity is just as much about having the courage to mess things up as it is about making something beautiful.
- Success is not about avoiding failures; it's about collecting the right ones to adorn your adventure.
- Success is a journey less traveled, but at least it comes with stunning views and unexpected pit stops.
- Success is not just waking up earlier than everyone else; it's also making that coffee just right!
- Success is a path well-traveled; don’t follow the map, carve your own!
- Great leaders aren't afraid to leave their comfort zones because the best views come from the courage to climb.
- Embracing a future bound in tech uncertainty is akin to navigating a vast ocean where the storms of change rush our sails and the compass of old maps eclipse true horizons.
- In the whirlwind of technology, celebrating the chaos makes way for ancient questions to dawn anew, transforming complexity into adventure rather than dread.
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