Top 450 Ernest Cline Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Sorrento,” I said, trying to hide the fear in my voice, “I want you and your bosses to know something. You’re never going to find Halliday’s egg. You know why? Because he was smarter than all of you put together. It doesn’t matter how much money you have or who you try to blackmail. You’re going to lose.”

— Ernest Cline

302. “Gut’, sagte er und zwinkerte mir zu. ‘Mach nicht denselben Fehler wie ich. Versteck dich nicht ewig hier drin.”

— Ernest Cline

303. “This was not how I wanted to die. Not even close. And then my ex-girlfriend fell out of the sky.”

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

305. “Says you, assface. It has some great moments.” “No,” I said, shaking my head. “It doesn’t. It’s even worse than that first Ewok flick, Caravan of Courage. They shoulda called it Caravan of Suck.”

— Ernest Cline

306. “On the floor, directly underneath my suspended haptic chair, was my Okagami Runaround omnidirectional treadmill.”

— Ernest Cline

307. “Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation was a big place.”

— Ernest Cline

308. “I usually muted him, but I still recognized his Philly accent, and the cocky attitude that seemed to come along with it.”

— Ernest Cline

309. “All of them have tentacles, like their mother! The youngest one in curls!” Diehl laughed. Cruz laughed. I laughed.”

— Ernest Cline

310. “You’re going to die. We all die. That’s just how it is.”

— Ernest Cline

311. “This avatar appeared inside a huge virtual call center, inside a virtual cubicle, sitting at a virtual desk, in front of a virtual computer, wearing a virtual phone headset. I thought of this place as my own private virtual hell.”

— Ernest Cline

312. “You’re an ignorant know-nothing twink.”

— Ernest Cline

313. “Maybe it was just as I had always secretly feared: The apple had fallen right next to the Crazy Tree.”

— Ernest Cline

314. “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

315. “I RODE THE turbo elevator back up to the observation deck. The moment the elevator doors swished open and I stepped into the large domed room, the odor of burning cannabis filled my nose. The smell grew increasingly stronger the farther I ventured into the room, as did the familiar strains of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, punctuated by fits of only slightly suppressed laughter.”

— Ernest Cline

316. “One artificially intelligent supercomputer pretending to be a hostile alien race for the purpose of testing humanity’s character?”

— Ernest Cline

317. “After all, I’d just won the contest to become his sole heir.”

— Ernest Cline

318. “Someone had keyed my car.”

— Ernest Cline

319. “Like any classic videogame, the Hunt had simply reached a new, more difficult level. A new level often required an entirely new strategy. I.”

— Ernest Cline

320. “His paternal tone irked me no end, and that helped to steel my resolve. I couldn’t sell out the the Sixers.”

— Ernest Cline

321. “Normally, the newsfeeds didn’t interrupt everyone’s interactive sitcoms and soap operas unless something really major had happened. Like the outbreak of some new killer virus, or another major city vanishing in a mushroom cloud. Big stuff like that.”

— Ernest Cline

322. “On the few occasions that Halliday agreed to do interviews, his behavior came off as bizarre, even by game-designer standards. He was hyperkinetic, aloof, and so socially inept that the interviewers often came away with the impression he was mentally ill.”

— Ernest Cline

323. “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

324. “But these were real aliens we were fighting – sentient beings with highly advanced technology, intent on destroying us. And we were outnumbered thousands to one. We should’ve been dead a hundred times already. Were humans really just better at war than they were, or all this time, had the aliens been throwing the game?”

— Ernest Cline

325. “The sight suddenly drove home the fantastic isolation of the place.”

— Ernest Cline

326. “Year after year, my eyes would scan the lunchroom like a T-1000, searching for a clique that might accept me.”

— Ernest Cline

327. “This is a special strain of Yoda Kush that I myself created,” Shin said, holding up his giant spliff.”

— Ernest Cline

328. “I’d never had such a powerful, immediate connection with another human being before.”

— Ernest Cline

329. “Most users chose to run a “voyeur channel,” which was like being the star of your own twenty-four-hour reality show. Hovering virtual cameras would follow your avatar around the OASIS as you went about your day-to-day activities.”

— Ernest Cline

330. “A pleasant place for the world to hide from its problems while human civilization slowly collapses, primarily due to neglect.”

— Ernest Cline

331. “The tenderness in her tone, which had once been so familiar to me, now felt completely foreign. Hearing it again was like a knife in my heart.”

— Ernest Cline

332. “The ability to mute my peers was one of my favorite things about attending school online, and I took advantage of it almost daily.”

— Ernest Cline

333. “There was no way I’d be able to sleep tonight, or sit through school tomorrow. I had to go now.”

— Ernest Cline

334. “I opened my eyes to see her staring down at me. “Thank you!” I said, throwing my arms around her. My voice came out as a whisper. “Thank you for saving me. Thank you for coming back.” I forced myself to let go of her.”

— Ernest Cline

335. “My bullet bill this month was going to be huge.”

— Ernest Cline

336. “When my ship reached Syrinx, I saw the twin moons, By-Tor and Snow Dog, that orbited the planet. Their names were taken from another classic Rush song.”

— Ernest Cline

337. “Correct,” the machine replied. “But thankfully you made the correct choice, and knowingly disengaged from the cycle of warlike escalation with your imaginary enemy. That is why I’m speaking to you now. Once the Test has been passed, the Emissary makes contact with the individual most directly responsible, to inform them that their species has been invited to join the Sodality.”

— Ernest Cline

338. “Several Sonic the Hedgehog games involved a quest to collect seven “Chaos Emeralds” that could be harnessed to obtain special powers. Inside the OASIS, dozens of different quests on Mobius Prime allowed you to collect the seven Chaos Emeralds, and I’d completed all of them. But if there was a way to trade the emeralds for one of the shards, I still hadn’t discovered it.”

— Ernest Cline

339. “At first, I couldn’t understand why the media was making such a big deal of the billionaire’s death. After all, the people of Planet Earth had other concerns. The ongoing energy crisis. Catastrophic climate change. Widespread famine, poverty and disease. Half a dozen wars. You know: “dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria.”

— Ernest Cline

340. “Out here on the perimeter, there are no stars.”

— Ernest Cline

341. “I never blamed my mom for the way things were. She was a victim of fate and cruel circumstance, like everyone else. Her generation had it the hardest. She’d been born into a world of plenty, then had to watch it all slowly vanish. More than anything, I remember feeling sorry for her.”

— Ernest Cline

342. “This is the OASIS. We exist as nothing but raw personality in here. Art3mis:.”

— Ernest Cline

343. “Ernest Cline lives in Austin, Texas, where he devotes a large portion of his time to geeking out. This is his first novel.”

— Ernest Cline

344. “So these aliens, they really have Glaive Fighters?”

— Ernest Cline

345. “Real estate within walking distance of a big city became far too valuable to waste on a flat plane of mobile homes, so someone had cooked up the brilliant idea of, as Mr. Miller pit it, “stacking the sumbitches,” to maximise the use of ground space.”

— Ernest Cline

346. “I couldn’t make myself be cautious around her. A little voice in my head kept trying to tell me that every word she said could be disinformation and that she might be playing me for a fool. But I didn’t believe it. I trusted her, even though I had every reason not to.”

— Ernest Cline

347. “I-r0k and Aech attended the same school and had a few classes together, but I still couldn’t figure out why Aech had granted him access to the Basement.”

— Ernest Cline

348. “Viper was also the name of a character in Top Gun, the film he’d just quoted.”

— Ernest Cline

349. “Several paragraphs of dense text began to scroll across the screen, an unreadable blur of legalese outlining all the details of enlistment. It would have taken hours to read it all, and then I still probably wouldn’t have understood a word of it.”

— Ernest Cline

350. “City-sized shopping malls were erected in the blink of an eye, and storefronts spread across planets like time-lapse footage of mold devouring an orange.”

— Ernest Cline