Top 450 Ernest Cline Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “These tiny creatures weren’t worth any experience points if you killed them. I’d checked.”

— Ernest Cline

202. “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

203. “Only time would tell.”

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

205. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

207. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

209. “El Riesgo Siempre Vive.”

— Ernest Cline

210. “I knew Knotcher was trying to push my buttons. Unfortunately, he’d pushed the big red one first.”

— Ernest Cline

211. “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

212. “As I stared out at the grim skyline, a bright sliver of the sun peeked over the horizon. Watching it rise, I performed a mental ritual: Whenever I saw the sun, I reminded myself that I was looking at a star. One of over a hundred billion stars 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

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

— Ernest Cline

214. “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

215. “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

216. “I’d programmed and dropped in a few back-to-back flicks starring Gamera, my favorite giant flying turtle.”

— Ernest Cline

217. “Ray was in his usual spot behind the counter, hunched over “Big Bootay,” his ancient overclocked gaming PC.”

— Ernest Cline

218. “You really think it’s that simple?” I said. “That you can just write a check for two hundred and forty billion dollars and fix all the world’s problems?”

— Ernest Cline

219. “It is the world’s first fully functional noninvasive brain-computer interface. It allows an OASIS user to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel their avatar’s virtual environment, via signals transmitted directly into their cerebral cortex. The headset’s sensor array also monitors and interprets its wearer’s brain activity, allowing them to control their OASIS avatar just as they do their physical body – simply by thinking about it.”

— Ernest Cline

220. “The only thing crazier than hallucinating a fictional videogame spaceship would be to blame it on a frosted breakfast pastry.”

— Ernest Cline

221. “I moved from one room to the next, mowing down every NPC in my path. The guards returned fire, but their bullets pinged harmlessly off my armor. 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

222. “It felt wonderful. Like being struck by lightning.”

— Ernest Cline

223. “I was 7 years old when the ’80s began and 17 years old when they ended, so it was an incredibly formative decade for me.”

— Ernest Cline

224. “Why would real aliens behave exactly like videogame simulations of themselves?”

— Ernest Cline

225. “Many of the gunters on the front lines took an involuntary step backward. A few others turned and ran for their lives.”

— Ernest Cline

226. “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

227. “You could shove it up your ass and pretend you’re a corn dog.”

— Ernest Cline

228. “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.”

— Ernest Cline

229. “The farther I went, the more confident I became.”

— Ernest Cline

230. “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

231. “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

232. “If it weren’t for Tolkien, all of us nerds would’ve had a lot less fun during the last ninety years.”

— Ernest Cline

233. “Don’t look directly in their eyes!” I heard Aech shout at us. “Never look in any of their eyes, OK?” I immediately averted my eyes and saw Shoto do the same thing. Aech caught us both staring at the ground. “I didn’t tell you to avoid looking at them!” Aech shouted. “Just avoid looking any of them in the eye for longer than a second or two, or they’ll go berserk, OK?”

— Ernest Cline

234. “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

235. “Well, hello there!”

— Ernest Cline

236. “Many species lack the ability to defy their own animal instincts and allow their intellect to prevail.”

— Ernest Cline

237. “The Copper Key awaits explorers In a tomb filled with horrors But you have much to learn If you hope to earn A place among the high scorers.”

— Ernest Cline

238. “MTFBWYA, Parzival.”

— Ernest Cline

239. “Life was like an extremely difficult, horribly unbalanced video game. But sometimes the game can have a surprise ending. And sometimes, when you think you’ve reached the end of the game, suddenly you find yourself standing in front of a whole new level. A level you’ve never seen before. And the only thing you can do is keep right on playing.”

— Ernest Cline

240. “Standing there, under the bleak fluorescents of my tiny one-room apartment, there was no escaping the truth. In real life, I was nothing but an antisocial hermit. A recluse. A pale-skinned pop culture–obsessed geek. An agoraphobic shut-in, with no real friends, family, or genuine human contact. I was just another sad, lost, lonely soul, wasting his life on a glorified videogame.”

— Ernest Cline

241. “For me, school had been a Darwinian exercise. A daily gauntlet of ridicule, abuse, and isolation.”

— Ernest Cline

242. “Finally, I want to thank all of the writers, filmmakers, actors, artists, musicians, programmers, game designers, and geeks whose work I’ve paid tribute to in this story. These people have all entertained and enlightened me, and I hope that – like Halliday’s hunt – this book will inspire others to seek out their creations.”

— Ernest Cline

243. “A mission where you have to blow up a Death Star while being attacked by two Borg Cubes inside an asteroid field?”

— Ernest Cline

244. “Good luck, Parzival,” he said. “And thanks. Thanks for playing my game.”

— Ernest Cline

245. “Also, don’t touch anything, and if you can help it, try not to look at anything either – not for longer than a second or two. Otherwise you might trigger some educational minigame or side quest that you’ll be forced to complete, and we’ll have to go on without you. We don’t have time to stop and play Blue’s Clues.”

— Ernest Cline

246. “The hour draws near!”

— Ernest Cline

247. “I knew Samantha wasn’t going to approve.”

— Ernest Cline

248. “Raw neural input, from a brain that was not my own.”

— Ernest Cline

249. “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.”

— Ernest Cline

250. “Now, thanks to the ONI, I could. And I did.”

— Ernest Cline