Top 450 Ernest Cline Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “OASIS. The Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation.”

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

405. “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

406. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

408. “NASA dubbed this spacecraft the Envoy I, and it reached Europa on the 9th of July, 1976 – the day humanity made its first direct contact with an alien intelligence.”

— Ernest Cline

409. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

417. “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

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

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

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

— Ernest Cline

433. “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

434. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

436. “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

437. “I wasn’t some dilettante.”

— Ernest Cline

438. “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

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

— Ernest Cline

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

445. “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

446. “Space – First coin-op arcade game – port of Spacewar!”

— Ernest Cline

447. “Great, Wade, I thought. You just called her laugh “dorky.” Real smooth.”

— Ernest Cline

448. “OK, Arty,” I said.”

— Ernest Cline

449. “I fired a last volley of plasma bolts at the unprotected enemy ship, which was already vibrating from the buildup of power in its reactor core, and held my breath as they streaked toward it, silently praying to Crom that they would reach the Glaive and destroy it before it finished transforming itself into a weapon of mass destruction.”

— Ernest Cline

450. “Zum ersten Mal in meinem Leben konnte mir die OASIS gestohlen bleiben.”

— Ernest Cline