Quotes from Ernest Cline

But don't go thinking I owe you any favors, mister. :-)

My grades suffered. I didn't care.

We sat there awhile, holding hands, reveling in the strange new sensation of actually touching one another.

Anorak's Invitation begins with the sound of trumpets, the opening of an old song called "Dead Man's Party.

recommended gunter reading list. Douglas Adams. Kurt Vonnegut. Neal Stephenson. Richard K. Morgan. Stephen King. Orson Scott Card. Terry Pratchett. Terry Brooks. Bester, Bradbury, Haldeman, Heinlein, Tolkien, Vance, Gibson, Gaiman, Sterling, Moorcock, Scalzi, Zelazny.

People who were cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, that's who. Cats with a serious marble deficiency.

Besides, 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.

I was curled up in an old sleeping bag in the corner of the trailer's tiny laundry room, wedged into the gap between the wall and the dryer.

Morrow […] felt that OASIS had evolved into something horrible. "It had become a self-imposed prison for humanity. A pleasant place for the world to hide from its problems while human civilization slowly collapses, primarily due to neglect.

During our World History lesson that morning, Mr. Avenovich loaded up a stand-alone simulation so that our class could witness the discovery of King Tut's tomb by archaeologists in Egypt in AD 1922. (The day before, we'd visited the same spot in 1334 BC and had seen Tutankhamen's empire in all its glory.)

Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!

As terrifying and painful as reality can be, it's also the only place we can find true happiness. Because reality is real.

I cleared my throat and recited my pass phrase. Each word appeared on my display as I said it. "No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful.

It's fucking lame, is what it is! The swords look like they were made out of tinfoil. And that soundtrack is epically lame. Full of synthesizers and shit. By the motherfucking Alan Parsons Project! Lame-o-rama! Beyond lame. Highlander II lame.

Everything about our online personas is filtered through our avatars, which allows us to control how we look and sound to others. The OASIS lets you be whoever you want to be. That's why everyone is addicted to it.

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.

Begin morning run," I said to Max. "Bifrost track." The virtual gym vanished. Now I was standing on a semitransparent running track, a curved looping ribbon suspended in a starry nebula. Giant ringed planets and multicolored moons were suspended in space all around me. The running track stretched out ahead of me, rising, falling, and occasionally spiraling into a helix.

I clearly had a few daddy issues myself, but you didn't see me pulling the wings off of flies. On the other hand, I did have a slight anger-management problem, and a related history of physical violence, both well documented by the public school system. And, oh yeah, that whole "hallucinating alien spacecraft from my favorite videogame" thing. So perhaps I wasn't in the best position to judge the sanity of others.

Elhagyni az otthonunkat súlyosan túlértékelt cselekvés.

Smooth move, Ex-lax," I heard Art3mis say.

And sometimes, when you think you've finally reached the end of the game, suddenly you find yourself standing at the start of a whole new level. A level that you've never seen before. And the only thing you can do is keep right on playing. Because the game that is your life still isn't over yet. And there's no telling how far you might be able to get, what you might discover, or who you might meet when you get there.

In those days, if you wanted to escape to another world, you had to create it yourself, using your brain, some paper, pencils, dice, and a few rule books.

You're going to turn it into a fascist corporate theme park where the few people who can still afford the price of admission no longer have an ounce of freedom.

The mind is the only thing about human beings that's worth anything. Why does it have to be tied to a bag of skin, blood, hair, meat, bones and tubes? No wonder people can't get anything done, stuck for life with a parasite that has to be stuffed with food and protected from weather and germs all the time. And the fool thing wears out anyway—no matter how much you stuff and protect it! —Kurt Vonnegut Jr.