Top 450 Ernest Cline Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Maybe it was just as I had always secretly feared: The apple had fallen right next to the Crazy Tree.”

— Ernest Cline

352. “It was still pretty dark down here, so I took out my flashlight and headed east, weaving my way through the dark maze, doing my best to remain unseen while being careful to avoid tripping over a shopping cart, engine block, or one of the other pieces of junk littering the narrow alleys between the stacks.”

— Ernest Cline

353. “The vast wasteland of television programming had finally reached its zenith, and the average person was no longer limited to fifteen minutes of fame.”

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

355. “My haptic suit did its best to simulate the sensation of torrents of falling water striking my body, but it felt more like someone pounding on my head, shoulders, and back with a bundle of sticks.”

— Ernest Cline

356. “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

357. “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

358. “Looking around, I wondered why Halliday, who always claimed to have had a miserable childhood, had later become so nostalgic for it. I knew that if and when I finally escaped from the stacks, I’d never look back. And I definitely wouldn’t create a detailed simulation of the place.”

— Ernest Cline

359. “When the countdown clock hit the ninety-minute mark, we all gathered in front of the command station to watch the president of the United States address the nation from the Oval Office on live television. She smiled reassuringly at the camera, but the fear in her eyes was evident.”

— Ernest Cline

360. “For less than the cost of an iced latte, you could now safely experience just about anything that human beings could experience.”

— Ernest Cline

361. “Parzival: Nope. You got parents? Art3mis: They died. The flu. So I was raised by my grandparents. You got parentage? Parzival: No. Mine are dead too. Art3mis: It kinda sucks, doesn’t it? Not having your parents around. Parzival: Yeah. But a lot of people are worse off than me. Art3mis: I tell myself that all the time.”

— Ernest Cline

362. “Og led us through the mansion’s lavish front entrance. The lights were off inside, but instead of turning them on, Morrow took an honest-to-God torch off the wall and used it to illuminate our way.”

— Ernest Cline

363. “I tried my best to fit in. Year after year, my eyes would scan the lunchroom like a T-1000, searching for a clique that might accept me. But even the other outcasts wanted nothing to do with me. I was too weird, even for the weirdos. And girls? Talking to girls was out of the question. To me, they were like some exotic alien species, both beautiful and terrifying. Whenever I got near one of them, I invariably broke out in a cold sweat and lost the ability to speak in complete sentences.”

— Ernest Cline

364. “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

365. “I aimed my rocket eighty-eight right into the torrent of enemy fighters and fanned the trigger on my flight stick to fire off a rapid volley of plasma bolts.”

— Ernest Cline

366. “And I apparently take this as my cue to shove my foot even further into my mouth.”

— Ernest Cline

367. “The whole God thing is actually an ancient fairy tale that people have been telling one another for thousands of years. We made it all up. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.”

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

369. “My father looked as if I’d just gutted him – but it was mingled with a twisted sense of satisfaction. It felt good to hurt his feelings.”

— Ernest Cline

370. “Competition brings out the best in me.”

— Ernest Cline

371. “I don’t want to work with you.” I leveled a finger at him. “You give me the creeps. But if your superiors are willing to fire your ass and give me your position, I’m in. It’s a done deal.” Silence.”

— Ernest Cline

372. “WarGames had been one of Halliday’s all-time favorite movies. Which was why I had watched it over three dozen times.”

— Ernest Cline

373. “She did it to get the extra food vouchers from the government every month. Most of the time, I had to find food on my own.”

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

377. “I gave her another salute – then, like a goofball, I pretended to poke myself in the eye as I did, just to hear the sound of her laugh.”

— Ernest Cline

378. “Our records also show that you are currently unemployed and have therefore been classified as impecunious. Under current federal law, you are now eligible for mandatory indenturement.”

— Ernest Cline

379. “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

380. “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

381. “We can’t be together anymore, Wade,” she said evenly, her voice suddenly devoid of emotion. “Not when we disagree on something so basic. And so important. Your actions today will have disastrous consequences. I’m sorry you can’t see that.”

— Ernest Cline

382. “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

383. “Sorry, Cruz!” I said, pushing my throttle forward. “But you’ll never guess who just showed up. Leeeeeeroyyy – ” “Oh, Lightman, don’t you even dare!” “ – mmm-Jenkinsss!” I broke formation with the others, leaving the Icebreaker behind as I moved to attack the nearest Dreadnaught. I slammed my throttle forward and crossed in front of it, strafing the turrets spaced along the sphere’s equator, taking out one or two of them. “Goddammit, Zack!” Cruz shouted. “Every time! Every goddamn time!”

— Ernest Cline

384. “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

385. “I need each of you to build the best rig you can, as fast as you can.”

— Ernest Cline

386. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

388. “As we sprinted from the Candle Room to the Music Club to the Boudoir to the Virtual Video Room, a song called “Interactive” played on a continuous loop in every room. Aech explained that this was a song Prince wrote exclusively for a Myst-like videogame he released with the same title.”

— Ernest Cline

389. “Era el nacimiento de una nueva era, una era en la que casi toda la humanidad pasaba su tiempo libre en un videojuego.”

— Ernest Cline

390. “Neal Stephenson.”

— Ernest Cline

391. “I made a big entrance when I arrived in my flying DeLorean, which I’d obtained by completing a Back to the Future quest on the planet Zemeckis.”

— Ernest Cline

392. “Yeah, I wish we could skip this storyline crap,” Cruz said. “Bor-ing.”

— Ernest Cline

393. “Listen,” I said. “It really was luck. I’ve got a knack for classic arcade games. That’s my specialty.” I shrugged. “Stop hitting yourself like Rain Man, OK?” She.”

— Ernest Cline

394. “It suddenly occurred to me just how absurd this scene was: a guy wearing a suit of armor, standing next to an undead king, both hunched over the controls of a classic arcade game. It was the sort of surreal image you’d expect to see on the cover of an old issue of Heavy Metal or Dragon magazine.”

— Ernest Cline

395. “I was still in love with her. And I always would be. I just wanted to live long enough to correct my mistakes and redeem myself in her eyes, if I could.”

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

397. “Van Halen, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, and Pink Floyd.”

— Ernest Cline

398. “The prize for the Earthworld contest was the Talisman of Penultimate Truth.”

— Ernest Cline

399. “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

400. “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