My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.
Maya LinRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of respect for personal experiences over intrusive inquiry.
Maya Lin's reflection on her experience building the Vietnam Memorial highlights a profound respect for the personal and often painful experiences of veterans. By choosing not to ask veterans about their wartime experiences, she acknowledges that each individual's story is deeply personal and may not be something they wish to share, thereby underlining the value of privacy and respect for those who have endured hardship.
Themes
MemorialRespectVeteransExperiencePrivacy
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of empathy in creating public art.
More from Maya Lin
All quotes →I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.
Maya LinRead
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.
Maya LinRead
Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.
Maya LinRead
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.
Maya LinRead
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 LinRead
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I think music is about our internal life. It’s part of the way people touch each other. That’s very precious to me. And astronomy is, in a sense, the very opposite thing. Instead of looking inwards, you are looking out, to things beyond our grasp.
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His outflung hands traced over the threads of his rug, passed loop by loop through some patient woman's hands. Or maybe she hadn't been patient. Maybe she'd been tired, or irritated, or distracted, or hungry, or angry. Maybe she had been dying. But her hands had kept moving, all the same.
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In art, at a certain level, there is no 'better than.' It's just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it.
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