Ten of My Favourite Ellen Ullman Quotes
Love reading? Then it’s likely you will love a good quote from your favourite author. This article covers Ellen Ullman’s Top 10 Popular and Famous Quotes that we at Australia Unwrapped have collected from some of his greatest works. Ellen Ullman quotes to remember and here you will find 10 of the best. A memorable quote can stay with you and can be used along your journey. Choosing Ellen Ullman’s top 10 quotes is not easy, but here they are:
Popular Quotes
“But you can’t stop knowing something, can you?”
― Ellen Ullman, By Blood
“I fear for the world the Internet is creating. 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. Physical reality—the discomfort and difficulty of abandoning one’s normal life—put a natural break on the formation of cults, separatist colonies, underground groups, apocalyptic churches, and extreme political parties.
But now, without leaving home, from the comfort of your easy chair, you can divorce yourself from the consensus on what constitutes “truth.” Each person can live in a private thought bubble, reading only those websites that reinforce his or her desired beliefs, joining only those online groups that give sustenance when the believer’s courage flags.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology
“I had this idea we would have ordered some good champagne, launched toast after toast to our humanity, which after all had created everything: the opportunities for the bug, the bug itself, and its solution. I think now it might have changed us, softened our failures, made us feel we belonged to—had a true stake in—those lives full of code we had separately stumbled into. I like to think it would have reassured him, saved him: To know that at the heart of the problem was the ancient mystery of time. To discover that between the blinks of the machine’s shuttered eye—going on without pause or cease; simulated, imagined, but still not caught—was life.”
― Ellen Ullman, The Bug
“I’ve managed to stay in a perpetual state of learning only by maintaining what I think of as a posture of ignorant humility. This humility is as mandatory as arrogance… There is only one way to deal with this humiliation: bow you head, let go of the idea that you know anything, and ask politely of this new machine “How do you wish to be operated?” If you accept your ignorance, once you really admit to yourself that everything you know is now useles, the new machine will be good to you and tell you: here is how to operate me.”
― Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents
“Debugging: what an odd word. As if “bugging” were the job of putting in bugs, and debugging the task of removing them. But no. The job of putting in bugs is called programming. A programmer writes some code and inevitably makes the mistakes that result in the malfunctions called bugs. Then, for some period of time, normally longer than the time it takes to design and write the code in the first place, the programmer tries to remove the mistakes.”
― Ellen Ullman, The Bug
“The corollary of constant change is ignorance. This is not often talked about: we computer experts barely know what we’re doing. We’re good at fussing and figuring out. We function well in a sea of unknowns. Our experience has only prepared us to deal with confusion. A programmer who denies this is probably lying, or else is densely unaware of himself.”
― Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents
“The disorder of the desk, the floor; the yellow Post-it notes everywhere; the whiteboards covered with scrawl: all this is the outward manifestation of the messiness of human thought. The messiness cannot go into the program; it piles up around the programmer.”
― Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents
“But now what? Is this a ticket to a new understanding of my life, or a bomb that’s going to blow up everything?
Consider one more possibility: that you remain essentially the same person you were, neither new nor destroyed.”
― Ellen Ullman, By Blood
“Do I have to recite any further risks you have taken? How much you have not conformed? How much internal bravery this implies?”
― Ellen Ullman, By Blood
“Code and forget, code and forget: programming as a collective exercise in incremental forgetting.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology
10 Famous Quotes by Author Ellen Ullman
10 quotes by Ellen Ullman there you go! It’s never an easy task picking the best quotations from great writers, so please if you disagree or have more to add, please comment and share your opinions. My 10 greatest Ellen Ullman quotes will likely be different from yours; however, that’s the best thing about them, each quote can mean something different to each person. So don’t wait, comment and shares your best Ellen Ullman Quote.
One Final Bonus – Ellen Ullman Quote
“The machine seemed to understand time and space, but it didn’t, not as we do. We are analog, fluid, swimming in a flowing sea of events, where one moment contains the next, is the next, since the notion of “moment” itself is the illusion. The machine—it—is digital, and digital is the decision to forget the idea of the infinitely moving wave, and just take snapshots, convincing yourself that if you take enough pictures, it won’t matter that you’ve left out the flowing, continuous aspect of things. You take the mimic for the thing mimicked and say, Good enough. But now I knew that between one pixel and the next—no matter how densely together you packed them—the world still existed, down to the finest grain of the stuff of the universe. And no matter how frequently that mouse located itself, sample after sample, snapshot after snapshot—here, now here, now here—something was always happening between the here’s. The mouse was still moving—was somewhere, but where? It couldn’t say. Time, invisible, was slipping through its digital now’s.”
― Ellen Ullman, The Bug
