Quotes from Ernest Cline

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.

These three words were always the last thing an OASIS user saw before leaving the real world and entering the virtual one: READY PLAYER ONE

I didn't think anyone would anticipate this move, because it was so clearly insane.

For me, growing up as a human being on the planet Earth in the twenty-first century was a real kick in the teeth. Existentially speaking.

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

My friend Kira always said that life is like an extremely difficult, horribly unbalanced videogame. When you're born, you're given a randomly generated character, with a randomly determined name, race, face, and social class. Your body is your avatar, and you spawn in a random geographic location, at a random moment in human history, surrounded by a random group of people, and then you have to try to survive for as long as you can.

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

I was just another sad, lost, lonely soul, wasting his life on a glorified videogame.

If there were other civilizations out there, why would they ever want to make contact with humanity? If this was how we treated each other, how much kindness could we possibly show to some race of bug-eyed beings from beyond?

I'd come to see my rig for what it was: an elaborate contraption for deceiving my senses, to allow me to live in a world that didn't exist. Each component of my rig was a bar in the cell where I had willingly imprisoned myself.

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..

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

The only thing crazier than hallucinating a fictional videogame spaceship would be to blame it on a frosted breakfast pastry.

The once-great country into which I'd been born now resembled its former self in name only. It didn't matter who was in charge. Those people were rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and everyone knew it.

Like most gunters, I voted to reelect Cory Doctorow and Wil Wheaton (again). There were no term limits, and those two geezers had been doing a kick-ass job of protecting user rights for over a decade.

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.

Two-Face was right. You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

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

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

No giant two-headed hermaphrodite demon unicorn avatars were allowed. Not on school ground, anyway.

Some time later, she leaned over and kissed me. It felt just like all those songs and poems had promised it would. It felt wonderful. Like being struck by lightning.

The apple had fallen right next to the crazy tree.

The ability to mute my peers was one of my favorite things about attending school online, and I took advantage of it almost daily. The best thing about it was that they could see that you'd muted them, and they couldn't do a damn thing about it.

So now the polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and the weather is all messed up. Plants and animals are dying off in record numbers, and lots of people are starving and homeless. And we're still fighting wars with each other, mostly over the few resources we have left.