Quotes from Ernest Cline

How the fuck do you negotiate with a piece of software?

She made me laugh. She made me think. She changed the way I saw the world.

I'd renamed my avatar Parzival, after the knight of Arthurian legend who had found the Holy Grail.

Once they got finished slapping you with pay deductions, late fees, and interest penalties, you wound up owing them more each month, instead of less. Once you made the mistake of getting yourself indentured, you would probably remain indentured for life. A lot of people didn't seem to mind this, though. They thought of it as job security.

L33t Haxorz Warezhaus

Inside were long rows of blue teleportation booths. Their shape and color always reminded me of Doctor Who's TARDIS.

It had become a self-imposed prison for humanity," he wrote. "A pleasant place for the world to hide from its problems while human civilization slowly collapses, primarily due to neglect.

Az iskola a szememben a darwini kiválasztódást modellezte. A suli a gúnyolódás, szívatás és kirekesztés helyszíne volt.

Soha senki nem kapja meg, amit akar, és ez gyönyör?.

Greetings," I said, bowing slightly. "I am Juan Sánchez Villa-Lobos Ramírez." She smirked. "Chief metallurgist to King Charles the Fifth of Spain?" "At your service," I replied, grinning. She'd caught my obscure Highlander quote and thrown another right back at me. It was Art3mis, all right.

My father looked as if I'd just gutted him, and I felt a pang of regret—but it was mingled with a twisted sense of satisfaction. It felt good to hurt his feelings—it was payback for the way his choices had irrevocably damaged my own.

Goddammit!" he shouted. "Well, what am I supposed to do with it now?" "You could shove it up your ass and pretend you're a corn dog." COURTESY

In Marie's opinion, the OASIS was the best thing that had ever happened to both women and people of color. From the very start, Marie had used a white male avatar to conduct all of her online business, because of the marked difference it made in how she was treated and the opportunities she was given. When

They may have used alien technology in these things," she said. "But the software they installed to run it all was clearly created by humans—overworked, underpaid programmers like me who take all kinds of shortcuts. The security protocols on the file-sharing system are a total joke. It only took me about five minutes to jailbreak this thing.

Why would real aliens behave exactly like videogame simulations of themselves?

I felt like I'd just been picked last for the world's biggest game of kickball.

Not horses," he replied, stepping away from his throne. "Birds.

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.

Even if alien visitors did decide to drop by this utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, no self-respecting extraterrestrial would ever pick my hometown of Beaverton, Oregon—aka Yawnsville, USA—as their point of first contact. Not unless their plan was to destroy our civilization by wiping out our least interesting locales first.

What if they're using videogames to train us to fight without us even knowing it? Like Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid, when he made Daniel-san paint his house, sand his deck, and wax all of his cars—he was training him and he didn't even realize it! Wax on, wax off—but on a global scale!

Middle Earth. Vulcan. Pern. Arrakis. Magrathea. Discworld, Mid-World, Riverworld, Ringworld. Worlds upon worlds.

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.

We were at the edge of space. The boundary I'd dreamed of crossing my entire life. I'd never really believed I'd get the chance to do it during my lifetime—let alone today, when I should've been in my first-period civics class.

I'm sort of like Q in the James Bond films. Except, you know, I only get to hand out this one thing.