Top 450 Ernest Cline Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “You’re welcome.”

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

204. “I wanted to propose marriage.”

— Ernest Cline

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

208. “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

209. “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

210. “She grinned and shook her head. “Chaotic Neutral, sugar.”

— Ernest Cline

211. “I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal. – Groucho Marx.”

— Ernest Cline

212. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

216. “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

217. “Now it’s time to take off every zig for great justice.”

— Ernest Cline

218. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

220. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

222. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

227. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

230. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

233. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

235. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

239. “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

240. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

242. “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

243. “Setec Astronomy.”

— Ernest Cline

244. “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

245. “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

246. “Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest.”

— Ernest Cline

247. “There it was: number 42. Another of Halliday’s jokes – according to one of his favorite novels, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the number 42 was the “Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.”

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

250. “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