Top 450 Ernest Cline Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “No one in the world gets what they want and that is beautiful.”

— Ernest Cline

2. “Being human totally sucks most of the time. Videogames are the only thing that make life bearable.”

— Ernest Cline

3. “Going outside is highly overrated.”

— Ernest Cline

4. “One person can keep a secret, but not two.”

— Ernest Cline

5. “You’d be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever.”

— Ernest Cline

6. “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

7. “Two-Face was right. You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

— Ernest Cline

8. “That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real.”

— Ernest Cline

9. “A river of words flowed between us.”

— Ernest Cline

10. “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

11. “You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada.”

— Ernest Cline

12. “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

13. “I burned through all of my extra lives in a matter of minutes, and my two least-favorite words appeared on the screen: GAME OVER.”

— Ernest Cline

14. “Somebody set up us the bomb,’ pal,” he quoted. “Now it’s time to take off every zig for great justice.”

— Ernest Cline

16. “I was watching a collection of vintage ’80s cereal commercials when I paused to wonder why cereal manufacturers no longer included toy prizes inside every box. It was a tragedy, in my opinion. Another sign that civilization was going straight down the tubes.”

— Ernest Cline

17. “Everybody has this fond association with the car from Back to the Future, but most people have never seen one. I’ve seen people drive off the berm trying to take pictures. It ends up being dangerous.”

— Ernest Cline

18. “I watched a lot of YouTube videos of cute geeky girls playing ’80s cover tunes on ukuleles. Technically, this wasn’t part of my research, but I had a serious cute-geeky-girls-playing-ukuleles fetish that I can neither explain nor defend.”

— Ernest Cline

19. “Everybody uses pop culture as a shorthand. You might make an obscure reference to Monty Python or Iron Eagle that only some people will get, but if they do it conveys a world of meaning.”

— Ernest Cline

20. “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

21. “Middle Earth. Vulcan. Pern. Arrakis. Magrathea. Discworld, Mid-World, Riverworld, Ringworld. Worlds upon worlds.”

— Ernest Cline

22. “In a way, these old role-playing games had been the first virtual-reality simulations, created long before computers were powerful enough to do the job. 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

23. “This human understands enough to know when he’s being messed with.”

— Ernest Cline

24. “No giant two-headed hermaphrodite demon unicorn avatars were allowed. Not on school ground, anyway.”

— Ernest Cline

25. “I mean, did you ever hear of Wikipedia? It’s free, douchebag.”

— Ernest Cline

26. “My friend Kira always said that life is like an extremely difficult, horribly unbalanced videogame. When you’re born, you’re given a randomly generated character, with a randomly determined name, race, face, and social class. Your body is your avatar, and you spawn in a random geographic location, at a random moment in human history, surrounded by a random group of people, and then you have to try to survive for as long as you can.”

— Ernest Cline

27. “Time to make the doughnuts.”

— Ernest Cline

28. “Being human totally sucks most of the time. Videogames are the only thing that make life bearable. – Anorak’s Almanac, Chapter 91, Verses 1–2.”

— Ernest Cline

29. “Going outside is highly overrated. – Anorak’s Almanac, Chapter 17, Verse 32.”

— Ernest Cline

30. “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

31. “I didn’t think anyone would anticipate this move, because it was so clearly insane.”

— Ernest Cline

32. “You don’t live in the real world, Z. From what you’ve told me, I don’t think you ever have. You’re like me. You live inside this illusion.” She motioned to our virtual surroundings.”

— Ernest Cline

33. “Everybody wants to rule the world.”

— Ernest Cline

34. “I know that the future is scary at times. But there’s just no escaping it.”

— Ernest Cline

35. “It had become a self-imposed prison for humanity,” he wrote. “A pleasant place for the world to hide from its problems while human civilization slowly collapses, primarily due to neglect.”

— Ernest Cline

36. “You’re probably wondering what’s going to happen to you. That’s easy. The same thing is going to happen to you that has happened to every other human being who has ever lived. You’re going to die. We all die. That’s just how it is.”

— Ernest Cline

37. “You’d be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever. Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, is a lot of study time.”

— Ernest Cline

38. “I was obsessed. I wouldn’t quit. My grades suffered. I didn’t care.”

— Ernest Cline

39. “The OASIS lets you be whoever you want to be. That’s why everyone is addicted to it.”

— Ernest Cline

40. “Other virtual worlds soon followed suit, from the Metaverse to the Matrix. The Firefly universe was anchored in a sector adjacent to the Star Wars galaxy, with a detailed re-creation of the Star Trek universe in the sector adjacent to that. Users could now teleport back and forth between their favorite fictional worlds. Middle Earth. Vulcan. Pern. Arrakis. Magrathea. Discworld, Mid-World, Riverworld, Ringworld. Worlds upon worlds.”

— Ernest Cline

41. “In the far reaches of the world, under a lost and lonely hill, lies the TOMB OF HORRORS. This labyrinthine crypt is filled with terrible traps, strange and ferocious monsters, rich and magical treasures, and somewhere within rests the evil DemiLich.”

— Ernest Cline

42. “When it came to my research, I never took any shortcuts. Over the past five years, I’d worked my way down the entire recommended gunter reading list. Douglas Adams. Kurt Vonnegut. Neal Stephenson. Richard K. Morgan. Stephen King. Orson Scott Card. Terry Pratchett. Terry Brooks. Bester, Bradbury, Haldeman, Heinlein, Tolkien, Vance, Gibson, Gaiman, Sterling, Moorcock, Scalzi, Zelazny.”

— Ernest Cline

43. “The simulation had now become indistinguishable from real life.”

— Ernest Cline

44. “Smooth move, Ex-lax,” I heard Art3mis say.”

— Ernest Cline

45. “If there was a bright center to the universe, I was on the planet it was farthest from. Please pass the blue milk, Aunt Beru.”

— Ernest Cline

46. “I have a thing for evil bald bad guys. The Kurgan is too sexy.”

— Ernest Cline

47. “I don’t know, maybe your experience differed from mine. For me, growing up as a human being on the planet Earth in the twenty-first century was a real kick in the teeth. Existentially speaking.”

— Ernest Cline

48. “Even though it was initially marketed as a new kind of massively multiplayer online game, the OASIS quickly evolved into a new way of life.”

— Ernest Cline

49. “I’d come to see my rig for what it was: an elaborate contraption for deceiving my senses, to allow me to live in a world that didn’t exist. Each component of my rig was a bar in the cell where I had willingly imprisoned myself.”

— Ernest Cline

50. “I’d spent my entire life overdosing on uncut escapism, willingly allowing fantasy to become my reality.”

— Ernest Cline