Top 450 Ernest Cline Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “There was no way I’d be able to sleep tonight, or sit through school tomorrow. I had to go now.”

— Ernest Cline

352. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

367. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “Neal Stephenson.”

— Ernest Cline

373. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

382. “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

383. “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

384. “Strong with the Dark Side of the Force that place is. In you must go, mofo.”

— Ernest Cline

385. “But I refused to give up. Until an avatar reached Halliday’s Easter egg, anything was still possible. Like any classic videogame, the Hunt had simply reached a new, more difficult level. A new level often required an entirely new strategy. I began to formulate a plan. A bold, outrageous plan that would require epic amounts of luck to pull off.”

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

396. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

398. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

400. “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