Quotes from Ellen Ullman

Do I have to recite any further risks you have taken? How much you have not conformed? How much internal bravery this implies?

This is what makes them good engineers. Perfectionism: incinerating perfectionism.

To program is to translate between the chaos of human life and the line-by-line world of computer language.

I'm an engineer for the same reason anyone is an engineer: a certain love for the intricate lives of things, a belief in a functional definition of reality. I do believe that the operational definition of a thing—how it works—is its most eloquent self-expression.

People who have no choice are generally unhappy. But people with too many choices are almost as unhappy as those who have no choice at all.

In this privatized world, what sort of cultural conversation can there be? What can one of us possibly say to another about our experience except Today I visited the museum of me, and I liked it.

I used to have dreams in which I was overhearing conversations I had to program. Once, I had to program two people making love. In my dream they sweated and tumbled while I sat with a cramped hand writing code. The couple went from gentle caresses to ever-widening passions, and I despaired as I tried desperately to find a way to express the act of love in the C computer language.

The nerd flavor of masculinity has overwhelmed the macho kind in real-life power dynamics, and therefore in popular culture.

I've managed to stay in a perpetual state of learning only by maintaining what I think of as a posture of ignorant humility.

I believed my motivations were clear: to help the patient see the pattern that had been imposed upon her, this endless repetition of being selected yet judged to be not exactly what was wanted, a purchase the buyer wished to return.

I've been told that women have trouble as engineers because we'd rather relate to people than to machines.

Uber's drivers are the R&D for Uber's driverless future. They are spending their labor and capital investments (cars) on their own future unemployment.

Meanwhile, the original programmers will have left, and their replacements -- believing they understand the code -- will make some truly spectacular errors, mistakes that will suddenly make everything completely stop working for a while. So that what had seemed to be a descending curve of bugs, a fall toward the ever-receding zero, will reveal itself as the shape of another equation altogether: a line of relentlessly rising, bug-counts climbing in an endless battle against infinity.

The therapist could not budge the patient from her syllogism. She replayed it throughout the hour, 'stuck in a single organization of events.' Seeing it from the other side (from behind the wall, as an observer), I understood the obsessive quality of such an attachment, something comforting in holding on to a smug, all-seeing knowledge, even a sad or hurtful one; something that let the patient control the precise amount of pain she administered to herself.

I once had a job where I didn't talk to anyone for two years. Here was the arrangement: I was the first engineer hired by a start-up software company. In exchange for large quantities of stock that might be worth something someday, I was supposed to give up my life.

Before the advent of the Web, if you wanted to sustain a belief in far-fetched ideas, you had to go out into the desert, or live on a compound in the mountains, or move from one badly furnished room to another in a series of safe houses.

The web is just another stunning point in the two-hundred-thousand-year history of human beings on earth. The taming of fire; the discovery of penicillin; the publication of 'Jane Eyre' - add anything you like.

I won't use Twitter. Twitter posts are thought-farts. I don't care about unconsidered thoughts of the moment.

I'm pretty bad at crying.

Computer systems could not work without standards - an agreement among programs and systems about how they will exchange information.

My mother told me that my birth mother got pregnant by a married man who didn't want to leave his wife.

When I am writing, and occasionally achieve single focus and presence, I finally feel that is where I'm supposed to be. Everything else is kind of anxiety.

I like the little semi-competencies of human beings, I realize. Governance, after all, is a messy business, a world of demi-solutions and compromise, where ideals are tarnished regularly.

Genetics is where we come from. It's deeply natural to want to know.