118 Quotes by Ellen Ullman

I came of technical age with UNIX, where I learned with power-greedy pleasure that you could kill a system right out from under yourself with a single command.

Some people hit a profession and just keep going deeper into it, making a life and making it more and more stable. That's not been my experience. I always want to try something new.

With code, what it means is what it does. It doesn't express, not really. It's a very bounded conversation. And writing is not bounded. That's what's hard about it.

Has Google appropriated the word 'search?' If so, I find it sad. Search is a deep human yearning, an ancient trope in the recorded history of human life.

I think technical people now should learn literature, because literature teaches you a great deal about how - the depths and variety of human imagination.

I think storytelling in general is how we really deeply know things. It's ancient.

I don't consider myself a Jewish writer.

It has occurred to me that if people really knew how software got written, I'm not sure they'd give their money to a bank or get on an airplane ever again.

Each new tool we create ends an old relationship with the world and starts a new one. And we're changed by that relationship, inevitably. It changes the way we live, changes our patterns, changes our social organization.