Top 450 Ernest Cline Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “The Vonnegut was a heavily modified Firefly-class transport vessel, modeled after the Serenity in the classic Firefly TV series.”

— Ernest Cline

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “I wanted to be able to write in the voice that I talk to my friends and assume that everybody would know what I was talking about.”

— Ernest Cline

156. “My characters are all kind of geek archetypes of people I’ve encountered at gaming and comic book conventions.”

— Ernest Cline

157. “Fincher, Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg, Del Toro, Tarantino. And, of course, Kevin Smith. I spent three months studying every John Hughes teen movie and memorizing all the key lines of dialogue. Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive. You could say I covered all the bases. I studied Monty Python. And not just Holy Grail, either. Every single one of their films, albums, and books, and every episode of the original BBC.”

— Ernest Cline

158. “I dropped my backpack, shrugged off my coat, and hopped on the exercise bike. Charging the batteries was usually the only physical exercise I got each day.”

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

160. “I’m incredibly nostalgic for the ’80s, because I think that’s when Geek Culture really kicked in to high gear.”

— Ernest Cline

161. “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

162. “When my father saw the jacket, he grinned wide and spent a minute looking over each and every patch.”

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

164. “If we don’t end war, war will end us. – H. G. Wells.”

— Ernest Cline

165. “I could barely believe myself. IOI had actually tried to kill me. To prevent me from winning a videogame contest. It was insane.”

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

167. “El Riesgo Siempre Vive.”

— Ernest Cline

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

172. “Now, I have a new quest. A far more important one.” “And that is?” “Revenge.”

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

180. “Only time would tell.”

— Ernest Cline

181. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

183. “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

184. “And sometimes, when you think you’ve finally reached the end of the game, suddenly you find yourself standing at the start of a whole new level. A level that you’ve never seen before. And the only thing you can do is keep right on playing. Because the game that is your life still isn’t over yet. And there’s no telling how far you might be able to get, what you might discover, or who you might meet when you get there.”

— Ernest Cline

185. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

191. “To quote Sarah Connor: ‘You’re all dead already.’ You, your friends, your customers – all of you. You poisoned your own planet, destroyed its climate, defiled its ecosystem, and killed off all of its biodiversity.” He pointed at each of us. “You’re going to be extinct soon, too, by your hands. And you know it. That’s why most of you spend every second you can wired up to the OASIS. You’ve already given up, and now you’re all just waiting around to die.”

— Ernest Cline

192. “Well, hello there!”

— Ernest Cline

193. “It’s the year 2044, and the real world has become an ugly place. We’re out of oil. we’ve wrecked the climate. Famine, poverty and disease are widespread.”

— Ernest Cline

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

197. “I’ve never really collected anything other than old Atari cartridges. I only had, like, 12 Atari games as a kid, so at some point in my 20s I decided I was going to own all of them.”

— Ernest Cline

198. “That was what saved me, I think. Suddenly I’d found something worth doing. A dream worth chasing. For the last five years, the Hunt had given me a goal and purpose. A quest to fulfill. A reason to get up in the morning. Something to look forward to.”

— Ernest Cline

199. “MTFBWYA, Parzival.”

— Ernest Cline

200. “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