Ernest Cline

“You could shove it up your ass and pretend you're a corn dog."COURTESY VIOLATION-RESPONSE MUTED-VIOLATION LOGGED”

“I was watching a collection of vintage '80s cereal commercials when I paused to wonder why cereal manufacturers no longer included toy prizes inside every box. It was a tragedy, in my opinion. Another sign that civilization was going straight down the tubes.”

“The rest of the trailer reeked of cat piss and abject poverty.”

“As we continued to talk, going through the motions of getting to know each other, I realized that we already did know each other, as well as any two people could. We’d known each other for years, in the most intimate way possible. We’d connected on a purely mental level. I understood her, trusted her, and loved her as a dear friend. None of that had changed, or could be changed by anything as inconsequential as her gender, or skin color, or sexual orientation.”

“She grinned. "Don't you want to build a huge interstellar spaceship, load it full of videogames, junk food, and comfy couches, and then get the hell out of here?" "I'm up for that, too," I said. "if it means I get to spend the rest of my life with you.”

“I wish someone had just told me the truth right up front, as soon as I was old enough to understand it. I wish someone had just said: “Here’s the deal, Wade. You’re something called a ‘human being.’ That’s a really smart kind of animal. Like every other animal on this planet, we’re descended from a single-celled organism that lived millions of years ago. This happened by a process called evolution, and you’ll learn more about it But trust me, that’s really how we all got here. There’s proof of it everywhere, buried in the rocks. That story you heard? About how we were all created by a super-powerful dude named God who lives up in the sky? Total bullshit. 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. “Oh, and by the way … there’s no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. Also bullshit. Sorry, kid Deal with it.”

“The clans began to bombard the outer force field with rockets, missiles, nukes, and harsh language.”

“A river of words flowed between us.”

“I burned through all of my extra lives in a matter of minutes, and my two least-favorite words appeared on the screen: GAME OVER.”

“Being human totally sucks most of the time. Videogames are the only thing that make life bearable.”

“Going outside is highly overrated.”

“I would argue that masturbation is the human animal's most important adaptation. The very cornerstone of our technological civilization. Our hands evolved to grip tools, all right—including our own. You see, thinkers, inventors, and scientists are usually geeks, and geeks have a harder time getting laid than anyone. Without the built-in sexual release valve provided by masturbation, it's doubtful that early humans would have ever mastered the secrets of fire or discovered the wheel. And you can bet that Galileo, Newton, and Einstein never would have made their discoveries if they hadn't first been able to clear their heads by slapping the salami (or "knocking a few protons off the old hydrogen atom"). The same goes for Marie Curie. Before she discovered radium, you can be certain she first discovered the little man in the canoe.”

“For one quarter, Black Tiger lets me escape from my rotten existence for three glorious hours. Pretty good deal.”

“I watched a lot of YouTube videos of cute geeky girls playing '80s cover tunes on ukuleles. Technically, this wasn't part of my research, but I had a serious cute-geeky-girls-playing-ukuleles fetish that I can neither explain nor defend.”

“I felt like a kid standing in the world's greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play.”

“You'd be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever.”

“Dilettantes,’ Art3mis said. ‘It’s their own fault for not knowing all the Schoolhouse Rock! lyrics by heart.”

“I never ran out of ammo, because each time I fired a round, a new round was teleported into the bottom of the clip. My bullet bill this month was going to be huge.”

“Continue your quest by taking the testYes, but what test? What test was I supposed to take? The Kobayashi Maru? The Pepsi Challenge? Could the clue have been any more vague?”

“Now that everyone could vote from home, via the OASIS, the only people who could get elected were movie stars, reality TV personalities, or radical televangelists..”

“You’re evil, you know that?” I said. She grinned and shook her head. “Chaotic Neutral, sugar.”

“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.”

“Very well!” he said. “You shall prove your worth by facing me in a joust!” I’d never heard of an undead lich king challenging someone to a joust. Especially not in a subterranean burial chamber. “All right,” I said uncertainly. “But won’t we be needing horses for that?” “Not horses,” he replied, stepping away from his throne. “Birds.”

“I’d designed my avatar’s face and body to look, more or less, like my own. My avatar had a slightly smaller nose than me, and he was taller. And thinner. And more muscular. And he didn’t have any teenage acne. But aside from these minor details, we looked more or less identical.”

“People who live in glass houses should shut the fuck up.”

“We lived in the Portland Avenue Stacks, a sprawling hive of discolored tin shoeboxes rusting on the shores of I-40, just west of Oklahoma City’s decaying skyscraper core.”

“You're probably wondering what's going to happen to you. That's easy. The same thing is going to happen to you that has happened to every other human being who has ever lived. You're going to die. We all die. That's just how it is.”

“I was obsessed. I wouldn't quit. My grades suffered. I didn't care.”

“I had a serious cute-geeky-girls-playing-ukuleles fetish that I can neither explain nor defend.”

“I have a thing for evil bald bad guys. The Kurgan is too sexy.”

“It is on!" Aech shouted into his comlink. "it is on like Red Dawn!”

“Parzival 110,000 highscore”

“You were born at a pretty crappy time in history. And it looks like things are only gonna get worse from here on out.”

“You know you've totally screwed up your life when your whole world turns to shit and the only person you have to talk to is your system agent software!”

“Lights," I said softly. This had become my favorite word over the past week. In my mind, it had become synonymous with freedom.”

“In the far reaches of the world, under a lost and lonely hill, lies the TOMB OF HORRORS. This labyrinthine crypt is filled with terrible traps, strange and ferocious monsters, rich and magical treasures, and somewhere within rests the evil DemiLich.”

“One person can keep a secret, but not two.”

“Virtual sex, no matter how realistic, was really nothing but glorified, computer-assisted masturbation.”

“I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn't know how to connect with the people there. I was afraid, for all of my life, right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it's also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real.”

“Whenever I saw the sun, I reminded myself that I was looking at a star. One of over a hundred billion in our galaxy. A galaxy that was just one of billions of other galaxies in the observable universe. This helped me keep things in perspective.”

“It's chick flick disguised as a sword-and-sorcery picture. The only genre film with less balls is probably... freakin' Legend. Anyone who actually enjoys Ladyhawke is a bona fide USDA-choice pussy!”