Charlie Jane Anders Quotes
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We don’t need better emotional communication from machines. We need people to have more empathy. The reason the Uncanny Valley exists is because humans created it to put other people into. It’s how we justify killing each other.
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Serafina was late for dinner because her emotional robots had been having a nervous breakdown.
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Someone who doesn’t care if they get Tater Tots or turnip slurry is a person who has given up on life.
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If you're a writer, you don't serve genres. Genres serve you. Like, if you're writing a science fiction story set on a spaceship, you don't have to have someone thrown out an airlock.
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Patricia decided there was nothing to do but climb the nearest tree and see if she could see anything from it. Like a road. Or a house. Or some landmark that Dirrp might recognize.
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Maybe she would have done more good as a playwright than as a doctor, after all - clichés were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged the sense of what was possible. Maybe if enough people had worked to demolish clichés, the world wouldn't have ended.
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“Laurence?” “Yeah.” He shrugged. And then his eyes grew. “Patricia?” “Yeah.” “Oh, cool. It’s good to, uh, see you again. How have you been?”
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“My god,” Mr. Rose was saying loud enough to ring through the crowded hallway. “What have you done?
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He found himself curious to ask her stuff and see how she responded - because he never, ever knew what Patricia would say about anything. He only knew it would be something weird.
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We don’t need better emotional communication from machines. We need people to have more empathy.
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The sheer volume of bad news had gotten beyond anybody’s ability to process into a narrative.
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He went to make coffee. Because when you have just heard about the possible transformation of the human race into feral monsters you need to be doing something with your hands and creating something hot and comforting for another person.
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I don't actually think that ethics are derived from principles. At all." Patricia scooted a little closer again and touched his arm with a few cool fingertips. "I think that the most basic thing of ethics is being aware of how your actions affect others, and having an awareness of what they want and how they feel. And that's always going to depend on who you're dealing with.
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Hernan always says that a perfect moment of beauty can last forever. But maybe some moments are so ugly that they never end, either. All you can do is be patient with yourself.
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This particular evening, a giant yellow moon crested over a clear warm sky, so every fixture, the owls included, was floodlit like a carnival on its last night in town, and moon-drunk roars came from every corner. A perfect night to go out and make some dirty magic.
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You might mistake understanding for forgiveness, but if you did, then the unforgiven wrong would catch you off guard, like a cramp, just as you reached for generosity.
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I think that technology is much more mysterious to the people using it than, say, the automobile was. This isn't an original observation, but a lot of the smart devices people rely on now really do feel like magic to a lot of us.
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There are no requirements when you're using a particular genre. It's not like the genre is your boss and you have to do what it says. You can make use of the genre any way you want to, as long as you can make it work.
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You know... no matter what you do, people are going to expect you to be someone you're not. But if you're clever and lucky and work your butt off, then you get to be surrounded by people who expect you to be the person you wish you were.
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A society that has to burn witches to hold itself together is a society that has already failed, and just doesn't know it yet.
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Plus Ginnifer’s Sexoskeleton, which would take way too long to describe.
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Everything is a different shape in the dark. Sharp edges are sharper, walls farther away, fragile items more prone to topple.
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Self-awareness paradoxically requires an awareness of the other.
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We could not ‘break’ nature if we spent a million years trying. This planet is a speck, and we are specks on a speck. But our little habitat is fragile, and we cannot live without it.