Top 450 Ernest Cline Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

353. “I stopped moving forward and the sound of hoofbeats also ceased, but not until a few seconds later. I turned around and saw the source of the sound. It wasn’t a horse. It was a man banging two coconut halves together.”

— Ernest Cline

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

358. “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

359. “Hello, fish,” I whispered, reciting an old incantation. “Welcome to my barrel.”

— Ernest Cline

360. “Ray, we don’t have much time,” I said. “We need to access the EDA intranet node hidden here in the store. It’s an emergency.” Ray only hesitated for a split second. “Behind the UFO poster on the back wall.” I turned and located the one he was talking about – a framed reprint of Mulder’s “I Want to Believe” poster from The X-Files. I took it down, revealing what appeared to be a small titanium safe embedded in the brick wall behind it, with a keypad at its center.”

— Ernest Cline

361. “You’re just dead, your brain stops working, and then you’re not around to ask annoying questions anymore.”

— Ernest Cline

362. “The guy had no sense of decorum.”

— Ernest Cline

363. “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

364. “At the center of all that gear was the opening DJ, R2-D2, hard at work, using his various robotic arms to work the turntables.”

— Ernest Cline

365. “At the center of all that gear was the opening DJ, R2-D2, hard at work, using his various robotic arms to work the turntables. I recognized the tune he was playing: the ’88 remix of New Order’s “Blue Monday,” with a lot of Star Wars droid sound samples mixed in.”

— Ernest Cline

366. “You have a gift for making friends who are much cooler than you are.”

— Ernest Cline

367. “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

368. “Ray seemed to subsist primarily on a diet of high-fructose junk food and old videogames. It was hard not to love the guy. Back.”

— Ernest Cline

369. “Like most gunters, I voted to reelect Cory Doctorow and Wil Wheaton.”

— Ernest Cline

370. “I was a man of science, even if I did usually get a C in it.”

— Ernest Cline

371. “Christ! Haven’t any of you rewatched The Matrix lately? Or Sword Art Online?”

— Ernest Cline

372. “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

373. “Star Trek? Oh, I did my homework. TOS, TNG, DS9. Even Voyager and Enterprise. I watched them all in chronological order. The movies, too. Phasers locked on target.”

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

375. “It was Art3mis. She wore a suit of scaled gunmetal-blue armor that looked more sci-fi than fantasy. Twin blaster pistols were slung low on her hips in quickdraw holsters, and there was a long, curved elvish sword in a scabbard across her back. She wore fingerless Road Warrior–style racing gloves and a pair of classic Ray-Ban shades. Overall, she seemed to be going for a sort of mid-’80s postapocalyptic cyberpunk girl-next-door look. And it was working for me, in a big way. In a word: hot.”

— Ernest Cline

376. “Peu importaient les responsables au pouvoir, ils se contentaient de modifier l’agencement des transats sur le pont du Titanic, et personne ne se faisait d’illusions.”

— Ernest Cline

377. “Neal Stephenson.”

— Ernest Cline

378. “Besides, what if BSG and Firefly took place in the same universe? You ever consider that?” I.”

— Ernest Cline

379. “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

380. “Pretend they’re Gungans,” Cruz suggested. “And that we get to nuke Jar Jar.”

— Ernest Cline

381. “My father’s face contorted in pain, and that was when I turned and walked away, well out of earshot, to let them talk in private – and to avoid a crying jag of my own.”

— Ernest Cline

382. “Once we reached the edge of the Be-Free Forest, we entered Holden’s Field – a large, flat, open field of rye, perched precariously on the edge of the Cliffs of Salinger, a place where I had completed several different book-report quests at several different grade levels. I had also played countless games of tag in this field, with other kids from around the world. Kids I had never met and would never meet in the real world, with usernames that they had probably changed long ago.”

— Ernest Cline

383. “Player One button, and my worries would instantly slip away as my mind focused itself on the relentless pixelated onslaught on the screen in front of me. There, inside the game’s two-dimensional universe, life was simple: It’s just you against the machine. Move with your left hand, shoot with your right, and try to stay alive as long as possible.”

— Ernest Cline

384. “To win the videogame of life you just have to try to make the experience of being forced to play it as pleasant as possible, for yourself, and for all of the other players you encounter in your travels.”

— Ernest Cline

385. “Halliday had prepared a short video message, along with instructions that it be released to the world media at the time of his death.”

— Ernest Cline

386. “I wasn’t some dilettante.”

— Ernest Cline

387. “He wasn’t dead!”

— Ernest Cline

388. “This is your QComm,” he explained. “It’s a Quantum Communicator – basically a smartphone with unlimited range. It will work anywhere in the world – or in outer space.” He smiled. “They also have insanely fast Internet access and Bluetooth capability. I already imported all of your contacts, photos, and music from your iPhone, so you’re all set up.”

— Ernest Cline

389. “When I played the classics, I did so with a determined sort of reverence.”

— Ernest Cline

390. “I took control of a Happy Helpdesk avatar, a cookie-cutter Ken doll that I used to take tech-support calls. 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

391. “She used to make me wear earplugs at night so I wouldn’t hear her in the next room, talking dirty to tricks in other time zones.”

— Ernest Cline

392. “I also have a habit of overeating when I was depressed or frustrated, which was most of the time.”

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

394. “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

395. “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

396. “Cats with a serious marble deficiency.”

— Ernest Cline

397. “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

398. “Parzival: Farewell, Art3mis. Sweet dreams.”

— Ernest Cline

399. “Not trusting my instincts any further, I loaded up a piece of high-end avatar dance software called Travoltra, which I’d downloaded and tested earlier that evening. The program took control of Parzival’s movements, synching them up with the music, and all four of my limbs were transformed into undulating cosine waves. Just like that, I became a dancing fool. Art3mis.”

— Ernest Cline

400. “I don’t care if Spielberg directed.”

— Ernest Cline