Top 450 Ernest Cline Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Strong with the Dark Side of the Force that place is. In you must go, mofo.”

— Ernest Cline

402. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

405. “Con endoesqueletos accionados con servomotor.”

— Ernest Cline

406. “I never knew how to act or what to say, and when I did work up the courage to speak, I always seemed to say the wrong thing.”

— Ernest Cline

407. “Leeroy Jenkins!”

— Ernest Cline

408. “His proclamation was met with a deafening roar of shouted threats, insults, and colorful profanity.”

— Ernest Cline

409. “Busted,” I said, raising my hands in a gesture of guilt. “That’s what you get.”

— Ernest Cline

410. “Not only was this the first time a girl had ever given me her card, it was also, by far, the coolest contact card I had ever seen. “This is, by far, the coolest contact card I have ever seen,” I said. “Thank you!” I.”

— Ernest Cline

411. “I actually switched to a third-person view for a few seconds, just to admire how cool my avatar looked wearing it.”

— Ernest Cline

412. “I spotted shots from various films in the Trek and Wars franchises, mixed with shots from the various versions of War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, V, and even – God help us – Battlefield Earth.”

— Ernest Cline

413. “My accusation seemed to detonate on his face like a bomb. His features began to contort, but I turned my back on him so I wouldn’t have to see the rest of his reaction. I walked out of there as fast as I could without looking.”

— Ernest Cline

414. “And, of course, Kevin Smith.”

— Ernest Cline

415. “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

416. “She did it to get the extra food vouchers from the government every month.”

— Ernest Cline

417. “Especially when it came to the videogames. Videogames were my area of expertise. My double-weapon specailization. My dream Jeopardy! category.”

— Ernest Cline

418. “These items were nothing but ones and zeros stored on the OASIS servers, but they were also status symbols.”

— Ernest Cline

419. “We played vintage board games, watched movies, and listened to music. We talked for hours. Long, rambling conversations about everything under the sun. Spending time with her was intoxicating. We seemed to have everything in common. We shared the same interests. We were driven by the same goal. She got all of my jokes. She made me laugh. She made me think. She changed the way I saw the world. I’d never had such a powerful, immediate connection with another human being before.”

— Ernest Cline

420. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

423. “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

424. “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

425. “As soon as they saw Aech’s score increase, they would have used Fyndoro’s Tablet of Finding and learned that he was currently on Frobozz.”

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

427. “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

428. “Bester, Bradbury, Haldeman, Heinlein, Tolkien, Vance, Gibson, Gaiman, Scalzi, Zelazny.”

— Ernest Cline

429. “Admittedly, all the time I’d had to devote to the game had shaved a full point off my grade average, and it had probably cost me my relationship with Ellen, too.”

— Ernest Cline

430. “I didn’t get to find out who or what Kilgore was, because my father walked over and closed Milo’s pod canopy for him. Then he walked back over and watched nervously as I raised his QComm and placed the video call to my mother.”

— Ernest Cline

431. “It’s cold as balls in here!”

— Ernest Cline

432. “Now everyone could be on TV, every second of every day, whether or not anyone was watching.”

— Ernest Cline

433. “The sorts of movies my late father had been nuts about.”

— Ernest Cline

434. “When I tried to access one of the other entertainment libraries, Vintage Movies, the system informed me that I wouldn’t be granted access to a wider selection of entertainment options until I had received an above-average rating in three consecutive employee performance reviews. Then the system asked me if I wanted more information on the Indentured Employee Entertainment Reward Program. I didn’t.”

— Ernest Cline

435. “The real van that I’d used as my hideout had been extracted from the junk pile and airlifted to Columbus, so it could be put on display in the GSS Museum.”

— Ernest Cline

436. “That’s the first rule of online romances, pal. No one ever looks anything like their avatar.”

— Ernest Cline

437. “Newer, faster, or more versatile components were always being released, so I was constantly spending large chunks of my meager income on upgrades.”

— Ernest Cline

438. “I wasn’t some dilettante.”

— Ernest Cline

439. “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

440. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

442. “But we also figured out how to do science, which helped us develop technology.”

— Ernest Cline

443. “I blinked and looked again – but it was still out there, a shiny chrome disc zigzagging around in the sky. My eyes struggled to track the object through a series of increasingly fast, impossibly sharp turns that would have juiced a human being, had there been any aboard. The disc streaked toward the distant horizon, then came to an instantaneous stop just above it. It hovered there motionless over the distant tree line for a few seconds, as if scanning.”

— Ernest Cline

444. “You had to be careful whenever you entered a new zone or sector. You had to be prepared. But like I said, I didn’t have that problem. I was stuck at school.”

— Ernest Cline

445. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

447. “The Great Recession was now entering its third decade, and unemployment was still at a record high. Even the fast-food joints in my neighborhood had a two-year waiting list for job applicants.”

— Ernest Cline

448. “Instead, he picked up his bass guitar, and, in what seemed like an odd coincidence, he began to play a solo version of “One of These Days” while staring up at the stars projected on the dome over our heads. Then I noticed a practice set list taped to the floor in front of him, and saw that several of the songs listed there were tracks I knew from my father’s old mixtapes.”

— Ernest Cline

449. “The half dozen GSS employees inside all avoided making direct eye contact. I could guess what all of them were thinking: Meet the new boss, weird as the old boss.”

— Ernest Cline

450. “Her instinct was always to act out of kindness and generosity instead of self-interest. She was a better person than me, and I was a better person when I was around her.”

— Ernest Cline