Top 100 Ernest Cline Quotes
#1. Ernest Cline lives in Austin, Texas, where he devotes a large portion of his time to geeking out. This is his first novel.
Ernest Cline
#2. I never knew how to act or what to say, and when I did work up the courage to speak, I always seemed to say the wrong thing.
Ernest Cline
#3. Continue your quest by taking the test
Yes, but what test? What test was I supposed to take? The Kobayashi Maru? The Pepsi Challenge? Could the clue have been any more vague?
Ernest Cline
#4. You know you've totally screwed up your life when your whole world turns to shit and the only person you have to talk to is your system agent software!
Ernest Cline
#5. Knavery?" Art3mis said after she'd finished reading it. "Were you using a thesaurus when you wrote this?
Ernest Cline
#6. No, we always get killed because of you, Leeroy Jenkins!
Ernest Cline
#8. Some time later, she leaned over and kissed me. It felt just like all those songs and poems had promised it would. It felt wonderful. Like being struck by lightning.
Ernest Cline
#9. I knew Knotcher was trying to push my buttons. Unfortunately, he'd pushed the big red one first.
Ernest Cline
#10. Once the people of planet Earth are all hanging out together online in a virtual world without any borders, I think it could change social networking, entertainment and even politics.
Ernest Cline
#11. Ray seemed about to say something more when a boom shook the entire shuttle. I felt a rush of panic, thinking we'd just come under attack. Then I realized we'd just broken the sound barrier.
Ernest Cline
#12. He often referred to Rush's three members - Neil Peart, Alex Lifeson, and Geddy Lee - as "the Holy Trinity" or "the Gods of the North.
Ernest Cline
#13. Anorak" was a nickname Halliday had been given by a female British exchange student at his high school.
Ernest Cline
#15. Og led us through the mansion's lavish front entrance. The lights were off inside, but instead of turning them on, Morrow took an honest-to-God torch off the wall and used it to illuminate our way.
Ernest Cline
#16. Now whenever I watched a Star Wars film, I found myself wondering how the Empire had the technology to make long-distance holographic phone calls between planets light-years apart, and yet no one had figured out how to make a remote-controlled TIE Fighter or X-Wing yet.
Ernest Cline
#17. My father looked as if I'd just gutted him, and I felt a pang of regret - but it was mingled with a twisted sense of satisfaction. It felt good to hurt his feelings - it was payback for the way his choices had irrevocably damaged my own.
Ernest Cline
#18. Mr. Morrow, IOI owns this network ... " "Of course they do!" Morrow shouted gleefully. 'The own practically everything! Including you, pretty boy! I mean did they tattoo a UPC code on your ass when they hired you to sit there and spout their corporate propaganda?
Ernest Cline
#19. You're going to turn it into a fascist corporate theme park where the few people who can still afford the price of admission no longer have an ounce of freedom.
Ernest Cline
#20. Especially when it came to the videogames. Videogames were my area of expertise. My double-weapon specailization. My dream Jeopardy! category.
Ernest Cline
#21. I had spent hundreds of hours gazing out at the calm, conquered suburban landscape surrounding my school, silently yearning for the outbreak of a zombie apocalypse, a freak accident that would give me super powers, or perhaps the sudden appearance of a band of time-traveling kleptomaniac dwarves.
Ernest Cline
#22. I'd designed my avatar's face and body to look, more or less, like my own. My avatar had a slightly smaller nose than me, and he was taller. And thinner. And more muscular. And he didn't have any teenage acne. But aside from these minor details, we looked more or less identical.
Ernest Cline
#23. He died when he was only nineteen years old. I was still a baby at the time, so I didn't remember him. Growing up, I'd always told myself that was lucky. Because you can't miss someone you don't remember.
But the truth was, I did miss him.
Ernest Cline
#24. The ability to mute my peers was one of my favorite things about attending school online, and I took advantage of it almost daily. The best thing about it was that they could see that you'd muted them, and they couldn't do a damn thing about it.
Ernest Cline
#25. Newer, faster, or more versatile components were always being released, so I was constantly spending large chunks of my meager income on upgrades.
Ernest Cline
#26. Now I feel bad," Diehl said. "Like we're about to nuke Aquaman. Or the Little Mermaid. ... "
"Pretend they're Gungans," Cruz suggested. "And that we get to nuke Jar Jar.
Ernest Cline
#27. I have to avoid things like 'World of Warcraft' or 'Minecraft', otherwise I'd never get any work done.
Ernest Cline
#28. I never ran out of ammo, because each time I fired a round, a new round was teleported into the bottom of the clip. My bullet bill this month was going to be huge.
Ernest Cline
#29. You don't need to sell me on anything, Wade," she said. "You're my best friend. My favorite person." With
Ernest Cline
#30. She used to make me wear earplugs at night so I wouldn't hear her in the next room, talking dirty to tricks in other time zones.
Ernest Cline
#31. Dilettantes,' Art3mis said. 'It's their own fault for not knowing all the Schoolhouse Rock! lyrics by heart.
Ernest Cline
#32. But we also figured out how to do science, which helped us develop technology.
Ernest Cline
#33. The single window had once provided a view of the Columbus skyline, but I'd spray-painted it completely black a few days after I moved in. I'd decided that everything outside the window was a distraction from my quest,
Ernest Cline
#34. Morrow [ ... ] felt that OASIS had evolved into something horrible. It had become a self-imposed prison for humanity. A pleasant place for the world to hide from its problems while human civilization slowly collapses, primarily due to neglect.
Ernest Cline
#35. These three words were always the last thing an OASIS user saw before leaving the real world and entering the virtual one: READY PLAYER ONE
Ernest Cline
#36. I don't know if the '80s were unique, but we certainly got original, groundbreaking stuff at the time with movies like 'Back to the Future' and 'Star Wars' - movies that became classics.
Ernest Cline
#37. This avatar appeared inside a huge virtual call center, inside a virtual cubicle, sitting at a virtual desk, in front of a virtual computer, wearing a virtual phone headset. I thought of this place as my own private virtual hell.
Ernest Cline
#38. I'd programmed and dropped in a few back-to-back flicks starring Gamera, my favorite giant flying turtle.
Ernest Cline
#39. The clans began to bombard the outer force field with rockets, missiles, nukes, and harsh language.
Ernest Cline
#40. In those days, if you wanted to escape to another world, you had to create it yourself, using your brain, some paper, pencils, dice, and a few rule books.
Ernest Cline
#41. People who live in glass houses should shut the fuck up.
Ernest Cline
#43. No giant two-headed hermaphrodite demon unicorn avatars were allowed. Not on school ground, anyway.
Ernest Cline
#44. Mr. S was finally retiring this year, which was a good thing, because he appeared to have run out of shits to give sometime in the previous century.
Ernest Cline
#45. I felt like a kid standing in the world's greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play.
Ernest Cline
#46. Many of the gunters on the front lines took an involuntary step backward. A few others turned and ran for their lives.
Ernest Cline
#47. We were at the edge of space. The boundary I'd dreamed of crossing my entire life. I'd never really believed I'd get the chance to do it during my lifetime - let alone today, when I should've been in my first-period civics class.
Ernest Cline
#48. You'd be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever.
Ernest Cline
#49. I noticed in the late 1990s that my friends and I were already nostalgic for the 1980s, and by the turn of the century, VH1's 'I Love the '80s' gave all of us an accelerated nostalgia for our generation.
Ernest Cline
#50. Video games paid for my house. What am I saying? Go ahead and keep playing!
Ernest Cline
#51. Like any classic videogame, the Hunt had simply reached a new, more difficult level. A new level often required an entirely new strategy. I
Ernest Cline
#52. Walking with a dead man over my shoulder. Don't run away, it's only me ...
Ernest Cline
#53. My generation had never known a world without the OASIS. To us, it was much more than a game or an entertainment platform. It had been an integral part of our lives for as far back as we could remember. We'd been born into an ugly world, and the OASIS was our one happy refuge.
Ernest Cline
#54. Whenever I saw the sun, I reminded myself that I was looking at a star. One of over a hundred billion in our galaxy. A galaxy that was just one of billions of other galaxies in the observable universe. This helped me keep things in perspective.
Ernest Cline
#55. Yeah. I was on a roll. In less than six months, I'd managed to wreck both of my closest friendships.
Ernest Cline
#56. My Shoes. Black Chuck Taylor All Stars. They bestow their wearer with both speed and flight.
Ernest Cline
#57. I was just starting out, trying to become a screenwriter, and I became the Austin slam champion three times. For a nerdy, kind of a socially awkward guy, that did wonders for my self esteem.
Ernest Cline
#58. Talking to girls was out of the question. To me, they were like some exotic alien species, both beautiful and terrifying.
Ernest Cline
#59. Space - First coin-op arcade game - port of Spacewar!
Ernest Cline
#60. Somebody set up us the bomb,' pal," he quoted. "Now it's time to take off every zig for great justice.
Ernest Cline
#61. I was curled up in an old sleeping bag in the corner of the trailer's tiny laundry room, wedged into the gap between the wall and the dryer.
Ernest Cline
#62. Then, on the evening of February 11, 2045, an avatar's name appeared at the top of the Scoreboard, for the whole world to see.
Ernest Cline
#63. And in addition to the credits, my avatar received an equal number of experience points for obtaining the coins.
Ernest Cline
#64. It occurred to me then that for the first time in as long as I could remember, I had absolutely no desire to log back into the OASIS."
- Wade Owen Watts
Ready Player One
Ernest Cline
#65. You and the other Sux0rz can all go fuck a duck.
Ernest Cline
#66. I'd spent my entire life overdosing on uncut escapism, willingly allowing fantasy to become my reality.
Ernest Cline
#67. I was just another sad, lost, lonely soul, wasting his life on a glorified videogame.
Ernest Cline
#68. Several paragraphs of dense text began to scroll across the screen, an unreadable blur of legalese outlining all the details of enlistment. It would have taken hours to read it all, and then I still probably wouldn't have understood a word of it.
Ernest Cline
#69. all dressed in mid-1980s attire. A woman with a giant ozone-depleting hairdo bobbed her head to an oversize Walkman. A
Ernest Cline
#70. When I reached the bar, I ordered a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster from the female Klingon bartender and downed half of it.
Ernest Cline
#71. Humans were still just a bunch of bipedal apes, divided into arbitrary tribes that were constantly at war over their ruined planet's dwindling natural resources.
Ernest Cline
#72. WarGames had been one of Halliday's all-time favorite movies. Which was why I had watched it over three dozen times.
Ernest Cline
#73. I was one of the boys who made passes at girls who wore glasses. Any girl who was smarter than me - that was a huge turn-on.
Ernest Cline
#74. Han will have that shield down,' " Aech quoted. " 'We've got to give him more time!'
Ernest Cline
#75. Virtual sex, no matter how realistic, was really nothing but glorified, computer-assisted masturbation.
Ernest Cline
#76. I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.
Ernest Cline
#78. We were all probably stuck here for the duration, on the third rock from our sun. Boldly going extinct.
Ernest Cline
#79. The Great Recession was now entering its third decade, and unemployment was still at a record high. Even the fast-food joints in my neighborhood had a two-year waiting list for job applicants.
Ernest Cline
#80. AA 241:87 - I would argue that masturbation is the human animal's most important adaptation. The very cornerstone of our technological civilization.
Ernest Cline
#81. You were born at a pretty crappy time in history. And it looks like things are only gonna get worse from here on out.
Ernest Cline
#82. I was staring out the classroom window and daydreaming of adventure when I spotted the flying saucer.
Ernest Cline
#83. The once-great country into which I'd been born now resembled its former self in name only. It didn't matter who was in charge. Those people were rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and everyone knew it.
Ernest Cline
#84. Not only was this the first time a girl had ever given me her card, it was also, by far, the coolest contact card I had ever seen. "This is, by far, the coolest contact card I have ever seen," I said. "Thank you!" I
Ernest Cline
#85. Being human totally sucks most of the time. Videogames are the only thing that make life bearable.
Ernest Cline
#86. These items were nothing but ones and zeros stored on the OASIS servers, but they were also status symbols. Most items only cost a few credits, but since they cost nothing for GSS to manufacture, it was all profit.
Ernest Cline
#89. It's chick flick disguised as a sword-and-sorcery picture. The only genre film with less balls is probably ... freakin' Legend. Anyone who actually enjoys Ladyhawke is a bona fide USDA-choice pussy!
Ernest Cline
#90. Why would real aliens behave exactly like videogame simulations of themselves?
Ernest Cline
#91. For one quarter, Black Tiger lets me escape from my rotten existence for three glorious hours. Pretty good deal.
Ernest Cline
#92. Since then, we'd used Street Fighter II to settle our disputes.
Ernest Cline
#93. I've retroactively made all that wasted time rotting my brain into research. It makes me a hypocrite when I try to tell my own daughter, "I don't know, I think we've played a little too much Mario."
Ernest Cline
#94. Maybe they seeded life on Earth millions of years ago, and now they're here to punish us for turning out to be such a lame species and inventing reality TV and shit?
Ernest Cline
#95. Anonymity was one of the major perks of the OASIS.
Ernest Cline
#96. Smooth move, Ex-lax," I heard Art3mis say.
Ernest Cline
#97. Dagorath was a word in Sindarin, the Elvish language J. R. R. Tolkien had created for The Lord of the Rings.
Ernest Cline
#98. What if they're using videogames to train us to fight without us even knowing it? Like Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid, when he made Daniel-san paint his house, sand his deck, and wax all of his cars - he was training him and he didn't even realize it! Wax on, wax off - but on a global scale!
Ernest Cline
#99. You're evil, you know that?" I said.
She grinned and shook her head. "Chaotic Neutral, sugar.
Ernest Cline
#100. I never wanted to return to the real world. Because the real world sucked. I
Ernest Cline
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