Quotes from Ernest Cline

All dressed up with nowhere to go. Walking with a dead man over my shoulder. Don't run away, it's only me.…

I'm not crazy about reality, but it's still the only place to get a decent meal.—Groucho Marx

El Riesgo Siempre Vive

The bottom of the egg was weighted, so it wobbled slightly before standing perfectly upright—like a Weeble. (Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down.)

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.

But you do realize that nearly half the people on this planet are starving, right?" I detected no malice in her voice. She sounded like she genuinely believed I might not be aware of this fact. "Yes, I know," I said defensively. "The reason so many people are starving is because we've wrecked the planet. The Earth is dying, you know? It's time to leave.

a gifted human player could always triumph over the game's AI, because software couldn't improvise. It could either react randomly, or in a limited number of predetermined ways, based on a finite number of preprogrammed conditions. This was an axiom in videogames, and would be until humans invented true artificial intelligence.

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. Do you understand?

Glenmorangie. On the rocks.

Like Raistlin said, 'Tick-tock.'

It used harmless low-powered lasers to draw the stunningly real environment of the OASIS right onto its wearer's retinas, completely immersing their entire field of vision in the online world. The visor was light-years ahead of the clunky virtual-reality goggles available prior to that time

but the reception inside the van was for shit, since it was buried under a huge mound of dense metal.

played it over and over, each time mouthing the words to the single lyric spoken in the middle of the song: "One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces.

Did my 'recruit profile' mention that my anger-management issues might be linked to the tragic death of my father in a shit-factory explosion when I was ten months old?" The

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.

whenever I watched a Star Wars film, I found myself wondering how the Empire had the technology to make long-distance holographic phone calls between planets light-years apart, and yet no one had figured out how to make a remote-controlled TIE Fighter or X-Wing yet.

Standing there, under the bleak fluorescents of my tiny one-room apartment, there was no escaping the truth. In real life, I was nothing but an antisocial hermit. A recluse. A pale-skinned pop culture–obsessed geek. An agoraphobic shut-in, with no real friends, family, or genuine human contact. I was just another sad, lost, lonely soul, wasting his life on a glorified videogame.

Maybe they seeded life on Earth millions of years ago, and now they're here to punish us for turning out to be such a lame species and inventing reality TV and shit?" He raised an index finger. "Or maybe they're omnipotent beings who have grown bored with immortality, and they're just tormenting us for their own twisted amusement? You know, like whenever Q would pop in from the continuum to fuck with Picard!

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.

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.

The sight suddenly drove home the fantastic isolation of the place.

I-r0k and Aech attended the same school and had a few classes together, but I still couldn't figure out why Aech had granted him access to the Basement.

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

standing on Europa, discussing the possibility of extraterrestrial life beneath the moon's icy crust.