Top 450 Ernest Cline Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Now, I have a new quest. A far more important one.” “And that is?” “Revenge.”

— Ernest Cline

152. “Begin morning run,” I said to Max. “Bifrost track.” The virtual gym vanished. Now I was standing on a semitransparent running track, a curved looping ribbon suspended in a starry nebula. Giant ringed planets and multicolored moons were suspended in space all around me. The running track stretched out ahead of me, rising, falling, and occasionally spiraling into a helix.”

— Ernest Cline

153. “I’d renamed my avatar Parzival, after the knight of Arthurian legend who had found the Holy Grail.”

— Ernest Cline

154. “These were subtle, nuanced sensations that could never be re-created or simulated by a pair of haptic gloves.”

— Ernest Cline

155. “I’ve heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.”

— Ernest Cline

156. “These new helmets can read your thoughts, too,” Ray joked. “But you have to think in Russian.”

— Ernest Cline

157. “The apple had fallen right next to the crazy tree.”

— Ernest Cline

158. “I notice when I’m at a party where I don’t know anybody – even if I have nothing in common with somebody – we can still talk because we were raised by the same TV and cartoons and movies.”

— Ernest Cline

159. “As I watched them embrace, there on the front lawn, my heart was rocked by waves of unbridled joy. It occurred to me that up until this moment I’d only ever experienced the bridled kind.”

— Ernest Cline

160. “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

161. “Once they got finished slapping you with pay deductions, late fees, and interest penalties, you wound up owing them more each month, instead of less. Once you made the mistake of getting yourself indentured, you would probably remain indentured for life. A lot of people didn’t seem to mind this, though. They thought of it as job security.”

— Ernest Cline

162. “Maybe every time an intelligent species grew advanced enough to invent a global computer network, they would then develop some form of social media, which would immediately fill these beings with such an intense hatred for one another that they ended up wiping themselves out within four or five decades.”

— Ernest Cline

163. “The clans began to bombard the outer force field with rockets, missiles, nukes, and harsh language.”

— Ernest Cline

164. “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

165. “Anorak” was a nickname Halliday had been given by a female British exchange student at his high school.”

— Ernest Cline

166. “None of that had changed, or could be changed by anything as inconsequential as her gender, or skin color, or sexual orientation.”

— Ernest Cline

167. “I felt like I’d just been picked last for the world’s biggest game of kickball.”

— Ernest Cline

168. “We’d connected on a purely mental level.”

— Ernest Cline

169. “I don’t know exactly what happened next, or how it all went down.”

— Ernest Cline

170. “As I watched them embrace, there on the front lawn, my heart was rocked by waves of unbridled joy. It occurred to me that up until this moment I’d only ever experienced the bridled kind. Having the reins slipped off my heart after a lifetime of wearing them was a bit overwhelming – in the best possible way.”

— Ernest Cline

171. “This realization allowed me to calm myself enough to heed the whispered advice of Master Yoda now on repeat in my head: Let go of your anger.”

— Ernest Cline

172. “That was a giant ball of fail. What now?”

— Ernest Cline

173. “That’s how you know you’ve mastered a videogame – when a bunch of butt-hurt crybabies start to accuse you of cheating in an effort to cope with the beatdown they’ve just suffered at your hands.”

— Ernest Cline

174. “I’ve wanted to own a DeLorean since I was 10 years old, but it always seemed like a silly daydream. Like owning the ‘A-Team’ van or something.”

— Ernest Cline

175. “Apparently, ‘charity, hope, and faith’ are also the names of three martyred Catholic saints.”

— Ernest Cline

176. “Watching Knotcher torment Casey while the rest of us just sat and watched filled me not only with self-loathing, but with disgust for my whole species. If there were other civilizations out there, why would they ever want to make contact with humanity? If this was how we treated each other, how much kindness could we possibly show to some race of bug-eyed beings from beyond?”

— Ernest Cline

177. “I knew Armada was only a videogame, but I’d never been one of the “best of the best” at anything before, and my accomplishment gave me a real sense of pride.”

— Ernest Cline

178. “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

179. “A lot of gunters even questioned whether she was really female, but I wasn’t one of them. Probably because I couldn’t bear the idea that the girl with whom I was virtually smitten might actually be some middle-aged dude named Chuck, with back hair and male-pattern baldness.”

— Ernest Cline

180. “I wanted to propose marriage.”

— Ernest Cline

181. “And after you pull off that miracle, you can genetically engineer a bunch of Smurfs and unicorns to frolic around this new perfect world you’ve created.”

— Ernest Cline

182. “Everything about our online personas is filtered through our avatars, which allows us to control how we look and sound to others. The OASIS lets you be whoever you want to be. That’s why everyone is addicted to it.”

— Ernest Cline

183. “You’re welcome.”

— Ernest Cline

184. “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

185. “You promised to consider going to college to study how to make videogames, like Mike Cruz is planning to do?”

— Ernest Cline

186. “The Force will be with you,” Ray said, giving my shoulder one last squeeze. “Always.”

— Ernest Cline

187. “We told each other what movies we were currently watching and what books we were reading.”

— Ernest Cline

188. “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

189. “These tiny creatures weren’t worth any experience points if you killed them. I’d checked.”

— Ernest Cline

190. “They may have used alien technology in these things,” she said. “But the software they installed to run it all was clearly created by humans – overworked, underpaid programmers like me who take all kinds of shortcuts. The security protocols on the file-sharing system are a total joke. It only took me about five minutes to jailbreak this thing.”

— Ernest Cline

191. “The OASIS would ultimately change the way people around the world lived, worked, and communicated.”

— Ernest Cline

192. “Not horses,” he replied, stepping away from his throne. “Birds.”

— Ernest Cline

193. “As far as my house, I have a ton of video games and three or four old consoles.”

— Ernest Cline

194. “Being forced to sit between my mortal enemy and my ex-girlfriend every afternoon made seventh-period math feel like my own private Kobayashi Maru, a brutal no-win scenario designed to test my emotional fortitude.”

— Ernest Cline

195. “I tried to remain skeptical. I reminded myself that I was a man of science, even if I did usually get a C in it.”

— Ernest Cline

196. “Halliday’s favorites, like WarGames, Ghostbusters, Real Genius, Better Off Dead, or Revenge of the Nerds.”

— Ernest Cline

197. “As dazed as I was, I still remembered to say I was from Portland instead of Beaverton, to avoid sounding like a hick – or having to endure any beaver-related attempts at humor.”

— Ernest Cline

198. “We sat there awhile, holding hands, reveling in the strange new sensation of actually touching one another.”

— Ernest Cline

199. “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

200. “There’s no way they weren’t aware that we were watching them. They wanted us to see! It was like they were running a nonstop, year-round episode of How It’s Made by Aliens.”

— Ernest Cline