Quotes from Ernest Cline

You'd be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever.

Dagorath was a word in Sindarin, the Elvish language J. R. R. Tolkien had created for The Lord of the Rings.

He often referred to Rush's three members—Neil Peart, Alex Lifeson, and Geddy Lee—as "the Holy Trinity" or "the Gods of the North.

Superheroes don't use swords?" Diehl said gleefully. "What about Nightcrawler? Deadpool? Electra, Shatterstar, Green Arrow, Hawkeye—oh, and then there's Blade and Katana! Two superheroes who are actually named after swords! Oh, and Wolverine had that idiotic Muramasa Blade made with part of his soul. Which, while incredibly lame, was still a far cooler magical weapon than Sting!

Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive.

Re-creations of the Addams Family house, the abandoned shack in the Evil Dead trilogy, Tyler Durden's flophouse in Fight Club, and the Lars Homestead on Tattooine.

Welcome to Crystal Palace," Ray said. "That's the EDA's code name for this place." "Why?" I asked. He shook his head. "Because it's easier to say than 'Earth Defense Alliance Strategic Command Post Number Fourteen,' " he said. "Sounds cooler, too.

I watched a lot of YouTube videos of cute geeky girls playing '80s cover tunes on ukuleles. Technically, this wasn't part of my research, but I had a serious cute-geeky-girls-playing-ukuleles fetish that I can neither explain nor defend.

A lot of kids owned their own interplanetary vehicles. School parking lots all over Ludus were filled with UFOs, TIE fighters, old NASA space shuttles, Vipers from Battlestar Galactica, and other spacecraft designs lifted from every sci-fi movie and TV show you can think of.

This is just great," he grumbled under his breath. "Here I thought I was being recruited for an epic space adventure, but it turns out I'm a guest star on Love Boat: The Next Generation." "Set course…for romance!" Shin quoted, doing such a perfect Patrick Stewart impersonation that Milo and I both laughed out loud.

These tiny creatures weren't worth any experience points if you killed them. I'd checked.

You really think it's that simple?" I said. "That you can just write a check for two hundred and forty billion dollars and fix all the world's problems?

The Vonnegut was a heavily modified Firefly-class transport vessel, modeled after the Serenity in the classic Firefly TV series.

This crap had been going on for years now. In the absence of any real progress, gunter subculture had become mired in bravado, bullshit, and pointless infighting. It was sad, really.

You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada.

no self-respecting extraterrestrial would ever pick my hometown of Beaverton, Oregon—aka Yawnsville, USA—as their point of first contact.

I had a weakness for vintage kaiju and tokusatsu, shows like Spectreman, The Space Giants, and Supaidaman.

Apparently, 'charity, hope, and faith' are also the names of three martyred Catholic saints.

Maybe it isn't a good idea to tell a newly arrived human being that he's been born into a world of chaos, pain, and poverty just in time to watch everything fall to pieces.

Going outside is highly overrated. —Anorak's Almanac, Chapter 17, Verse 32

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.

A lot of gunters even questioned whether she was really female, but I wasn't one of them. Probably because I couldn't bear the idea that the girl with whom I was virtually smitten might actually be some middle-aged dude named Chuck, with back hair and male-pattern baldness.

Halliday's favorites, like WarGames, Ghostbusters, Real Genius, Better Off Dead, or Revenge of the Nerds

Being human totally sucks most of the time.