Top 450 Ernest Cline Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Before long, billions of people around the world were working and playing in the OASIS every day. Some of them met, fell in love, and got married without ever setting foot on the same continent. The lines of distinction between a person’s real identity and that of their avatar began to blur. It was the dawn of new era, one where most of the human race now spent all of their free time inside a videogame.”

— Ernest Cline

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “No weapons designer or engineer would build something with such an arbitrary weakness,” he said. “The Disrupter is more like something a videogame developer would come up with, to create a big challenge at the end of a level – a boss that requires a huge sacrifice to destroy.”

— Ernest Cline

56. “Man, I’m such a motormouth! A jabberjaw. A flibbertigibbet.”

— Ernest Cline

57. “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

58. “For one quarter, Black Tiger lets me escape from my rotten existence for three glorious hours. Pretty good deal.”

— Ernest Cline

59. “It’s so much better to hand over a finished book than having all these people waiting.”

— Ernest Cline

60. “I was going off the rails on a crazy train. You could practically hear Ozzy screaming “All aboard!” Don.”

— Ernest Cline

61. “Re-creations of the Addams Family house, the abandoned shack in the Evil Dead trilogy, Tyler Durden’s flophouse in Fight Club, and the Lars Homestead on Tattooine.”

— Ernest Cline

62. “I cleared my throat and recited my pass phrase. Each word appeared on my display as I said it. “No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful.”

— Ernest Cline

63. “Then, one glorious day, our principal announced that any student with a passing grade-point average could apply for a transfer to the new OASIS public school system. The real public school system, the one run by the government, had been an underfunded, overcrowded train wreck for decades. And now the conditions at many schools had gotten so terrible that every kid with half a brain was being encouraged to stay at home and attend school online.”

— Ernest Cline

64. “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

65. “Video games paid for my house. What am I saying? Go ahead and keep playing!”

— Ernest Cline

66. “Capitalism would inch forward, without my actually having to interact face-to-face with another human being. Which was exactly how I preferred it, thank you.”

— Ernest Cline

67. “I never wanted to return to the real world. Because the real world sucked. I.”

— Ernest Cline

68. “I was staring out the classroom window and daydreaming of adventure when I spotted the flying saucer.”

— Ernest Cline

69. “I clearly had a few daddy issues myself, but you didn’t see me pulling the wings off of flies. On the other hand, I did have a slight anger-management problem, and a related history of physical violence, both well documented by the public school system. And, oh yeah, that whole “hallucinating alien spacecraft from my favorite videogame” thing. So perhaps I wasn’t in the best position to judge the sanity of others.”

— Ernest Cline

70. “Dagorath was a word in Sindarin, the Elvish language J. R. R. Tolkien had created for The Lord of the Rings.”

— Ernest Cline

71. “Goddammit!” he shouted. “Well, what am I supposed to do with it now?” “You could shove it up your ass and pretend you’re a corn dog.” COURTESY.”

— Ernest Cline

72. “No, we always get killed because of you, Leeroy Jenkins!”

— Ernest Cline

73. “Human beings were never meant to participate in a worldwide social network comprised of billions of people. We were designed by evolution to be hunter-gatherers, with the mental capacity to interact and socialize with the other members of our tribe – a tribe made up of a few hundred other people at most. Interacting with thousands or even millions of other people on a daily basis was way too much for our ape-descended melons to handle.”

— Ernest Cline

74. “It was the dawn of new era, one where most of the human race now spent all of their free time inside a videogame.”

— Ernest Cline

75. “I tried to slip past her again, but she blocked my path and then stomped her foot down in front of me again, pretending like she was Gandalf and I was the balrog.”

— Ernest Cline

76. “Anyone smart enough to accomplish what they have should know better than to risk everything by talking to the vultures in the media.”

— Ernest Cline

77. “Talking to girls was out of the question. To me, they were like some exotic alien species, both beautiful and terrifying.”

— Ernest Cline

78. “Being human totally sucks most of the time.”

— Ernest Cline

79. “The world’s population was fast approaching ten billion people, and Mother Earth was making it abundantly clear that she could no longer sustain all of us.”

— Ernest Cline

80. “So I swallowed all of the dark ages nonsense they fed me. Some time passed. I grew up a little, and I gradually began to figure out that pretty much everyone had been lying to me about pretty much everything since the moment I emerged from my mother’s womb. This was an alarming revelation. It gave me trust issues later in life.”

— Ernest Cline

81. “It’s their own fault for not knowing all the Schoolhouse Rock! lyrics by heart.”

— Ernest Cline

82. “My mom once told me that my dad had given me an alliterative name, Wade Watts, because he thought it sounded like the secret identity of a superhero. Like Peter Parker or Clark Kent.”

— Ernest Cline

83. “Everybody uses pop culture as a shorthand.”

— Ernest Cline

84. “Basically, kid, what this all means is that life is a lot tougher than it used to be, in the Good Old Days, back before you were born. Things used to be awesome, but now they’re kinda terrifying. To be honest, the future doesn’t look too bright. You were born at a pretty crappy time in history. And it looks like things are only gonna get worse from here on out. Human civilization is in ‘decline.’ Some people even say it’s ’collapsing.”

— Ernest Cline

85. “There was always a trick to beating a computer-controlled opponent. At a game like this, a gifted human player could always triumph over the game’s AI, because software couldn’t improvise. It could either react randomly, or in a limited number of predetermined ways, based on a finite number of preprogrammed conditions. This was an axiom in videogames, and would be until humans invented true artificial intelligence.”

— Ernest Cline

86. “Anorak’s Invitation begins with the sound of trumpets, the opening of an old song called “Dead Man’s Party.”

— Ernest Cline

87. “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

88. “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

89. “What about The Simpsons, you ask? I knew more about Springfield than I knew about my own city.”

— Ernest Cline

90. “Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive.”

— Ernest Cline

91. “Even if alien visitors did decide to drop by this utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, no self-respecting extraterrestrial would ever pick my hometown of Beaverton, Oregon – aka Yawnsville, USA – as their point of first contact. Not unless their plan was to destroy our civilization by wiping out our least interesting locales first.”

— Ernest Cline

92. “Art3mis also ran her own vidfeed channel, Art3mivision, and I always kept one of my monitors tuned to it. Right now, she was airing her usual Monday evening fare: an episode of Square Pegs. After that would.”

— Ernest Cline

93. “I was having the best game of my life. This was it. I could feel it. Everything was finally falling in to place. I had the glow.”

— Ernest Cline

94. “When I reached the bar, I ordered a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster from the female Klingon bartender and downed half of it.”

— Ernest Cline

95. “I don’t care if Spielberg directed it. It’s a chick flick disguised as a sword-and-sorcery picture.”

— Ernest Cline

96. “I’ve been invited to speak at about 20 colleges. There’s always this moment when I’m having dinner with the college president: ‘Ernie, where’d you go to school?’”

— Ernest Cline

97. “People who were cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, that’s who. Cats with a serious marble deficiency.”

— Ernest Cline

98. “Welcome to Crystal Palace,” Ray said. “That’s the EDA’s code name for this place.” “Why?” I asked. He shook his head. “Because it’s easier to say than ‘Earth Defense Alliance Strategic Command Post Number Fourteen,’ ” he said. “Sounds cooler, too.”

— Ernest Cline

99. “I think it’s a bit silly to brand the Internet as the ‘downfall of youth.’”

— Ernest Cline

100. “I understood her, trusted her, and loved her as a dear friend. None of that had changed, or could be changed by anything as inconsequential as her gender, or skin color, or sexual orientation.”

— Ernest Cline