Quotes from Ernest Cline

It's their own fault for not knowing all the Schoolhouse Rock! lyrics by heart.

We were all probably stuck here for the duration, on the third rock from our sun. Boldly going extinct.

We told each other what movies we were currently watching and what books we were reading.

Then, one glorious day, our principal announced that any student with a passing grade-point average could apply for a transfer to the new OASIS public school system. The real public school system, the one run by the government, had been an underfunded, overcrowded train wreck for decades. And now the conditions at many schools had gotten so terrible that every kid with half a brain was being encouraged to stay at home and attend school online.

Being forced to sit between my mortal enemy and my ex-girlfriend every afternoon made seventh-period math feel like my own private Kobayashi Maru, a brutal no-win scenario designed to test my emotional fortitude.

He died when he was only nineteen years old. I was still a baby at the time, so I didn't remember him. Growing up, I'd always told myself that was lucky. Because you can't miss someone you don't remember. But the truth was, I did miss him.

Anonymity was one of the major perks of the OASIS.

I was having the best game of my life. This was it. I could feel it. Everything was finally falling in to place. I had the glow.

So I swallowed all of the dark ages nonsense they fed me. Some time passed. I grew up a little, and I gradually began to figure out that pretty much everyone had been lying to me about pretty much everything since the moment I emerged from my mother's womb. This was an alarming revelation. It gave me trust issues later in life.

There it was: number 42. Another of Halliday's jokes—according to one of his favorite novels, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the number 42 was the "Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

None of that had changed, or could be changed by anything as inconsequential as her gender, or skin color, or sexual orientation.

Everybody wants to rule the world.

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

The simulation had now become indistinguishable from real life.

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

Mr. Morrow, IOI owns this network..." "Of course they do!" Morrow shouted gleefully. 'The own practically everything! Including you, pretty boy! I mean did they tattoo a UPC code on your ass when they hired you to sit there and spout their corporate propaganda?

you only know what I want you to know, you only see what I want you to see."... Wade: " I don't care! I am in love with your mind, with the person you are. I couldn't care about the packaging.

Widespread famine, poverty, and disease. Half a dozen wars. You know: "dogs and cats living together Ã¢â'¬Â¦ mass hysteria!

No, we always get killed because of you, Leeroy Jenkins!

This human understands enough to know when he's being messed with.

A medida que leía las palabras que habían legado a la humanidad, iba comprendiendo cuál era la situación. Mi situación. Nuestra situación. Lo que la mayoría de la gente llamaba «la condición humana». Y no era nada bueno.

I had spent hundreds of hours gazing out at the calm, conquered suburban landscape surrounding my school, silently yearning for the outbreak of a zombie apocalypse, a freak accident that would give me super powers, or perhaps the sudden appearance of a band of time-traveling kleptomaniac dwarves.

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?

I was in love with her. I could feel it, deep in the soft, chewy caramel center of my being. And