Maya Lin Quotes

The past is never where you think you left it.

It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance who knows what you know. I see so many new folks nowadays who seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation has got to have some root in the past, or else you have got to explain every remark you make, and it wears a person out.

In this bright future you can't forget your past.

People say, 'Don't live in the past.' But I guess it depends on how interesting your past is.

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

I feel like history is about going and discovering the great human stories that just are every bit as relevant as anything that's going on today.

I came in 11 years ago. I remember it like it was tomorrow

The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.

We need history, not to tell us what happened or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible.

We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.

If history is really relevant in today's world, the proposition doesn't command much respect. Perhaps the past is a different country, but if so no one much wants to travel there.

There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future.

If there is any good in life, in history, in my own past, I invoke it now. I invoke it with all the passion with which I have lived.

Our spirit of life is not identical with that of our ancestors, and therefore their music, even if restored with utter technical perfections, can never have to us precisely the same meaning it had for them. We cannot tear down the barricade that separates the present world from things and deeds past.

I love history. It was the only thing I did well at in school. I'm not ashamed to admit that I was not a good student but I was great at history.

The past is what you take with you.

When you look at a photo twenty years from now, if you look at a photo of a moment in your life, or some friends, or yourself, you just have a lot more information about what that memory was. That's exciting to me. It's like a form of time preservation, I suppose.

It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

One of the sad things, I think, about the younger generation, quite frankly, is they have less sense of yesterday. And if you don't know who you were, you don't really know who you are.

...the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you. This is half the reason for the cure: It clean-sweeps; it makes the past, and all its pain, distant, like the barest impression on sparkling glass.

History is contemporary. Your understanding of history confirms what you think of the present. It's not neutral. I would be very surprised if people with a different view of the present, don't take issue with my view of the past. I just hope that people deal with the content of the film.

Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.

Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.

I write a lot about the past because I really see things clearly in hindsight.