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Ernest Cline Quotes

Total quotes: 39
“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.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
Tagged: humanity, Earth, Suffering
“You're probably wondering what's going to happen to you. That's easy. The same thing is going to happen to you that has happened to every other human being who has ever lived. You're going to die. We all die. That's just how it is.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: Death, Dying, Fate
“He made it through the first gate and avatars are gonna be on him like hoes on Santa.”
— i-R0k (voice), Ready Player One
Tagged: Simile Examples, santa, Avatars
“Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: first lines of books
“You were born at a pretty crappy time in history. And it looks like things are only gonna get worse from here on out.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: History, Life, Destruction, Earth
“For a bunch of hairless apes, we've actually managed to invent some pretty incredible things.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
Tagged: humans, inventions, technoloy
“In real life, I was nothing but an antisocial hermit. A recluse. A pale-skinned pop culture–obsessed geek.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: antisocial, hermit, nerd, geek
“Anyone smart enough to accomplish what they have should know better than to risk everything by talking to the vultures in the media.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: Media, Pop Culture, interviews
“I felt like a kid standing in the world's greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: arcade, Children, helpless
“Humans were still just a bunch of bipedal apes, divided into arbitrary tribes that were constantly at war over their ruined planet’s dwindling natural resources.”
— Ernest Cline, Armada
Tagged: humans, War, Suffering, Violence
“City-sized shopping malls were erected in the blink of an eye, and storefronts spread across planets like time-lapse footage of mold devouring an orange.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
Tagged: Shopping, commercialism, Cities
“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.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: catfishing, Love, Online
“For a bunch of hairless apes, we've actually managed to invent some pretty incredible things.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: humans, Society, Technology, inventions
“You'd be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: Research, Time, free time, Knowledge
“I’d spent my entire life overdosing on uncut escapism, willingly allowing fantasy to become my reality.”
— Ernest Cline, Armada
Tagged: Life, Escapism, Fantasy, Reality
“We were all probably stuck here for the duration, on the third rock from our sun. Boldly going extinct.”
— Ernest Cline, Armada
Tagged: Earth, extinction, humanity
“We sat there awhile, holding hands, reveling in the strange new sensation of actually touching one another.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: human contact, touching, Holding Hands
“Being human totally sucks most of the time. Video games are the only thing that make life bearable.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
Tagged: Video Games, Escapism, Life
“I understood her, trusted her, and loved her as a dear friend. None of that had changed, or could be changed by anything as inconsequential as her gender, or skin color, or sexual orientation.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: Friendship, gender, skin color, sexuality
“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.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: country, Destruction, Death
“You have to live the rest of your life knowing you're going to die someday and disappear forever.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: Life, Death, Gone
“Maybe honesty isn't the best policy after all. 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.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: Honesty, Lies, Pain, Poverty
“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?”
— Ernest Cline, Armada
Tagged: civilizations, humanity, Aliens
“I tried to remain skeptical. I reminded myself that I was a man of science, even if I did usually get a C in it.”
— Ernest Cline, Armada
Tagged: skeptic, Science, Logic
“If there was a bright center to the universe, I was on the planet it was farthest from.”
— Ernest Cline, Armada
Tagged: Happiness, beauty, Earth
“'Cause, like Halliday said, 'reality is the only thing that's real.'”
— Wade Watts, Ready Player One
Tagged: Reality, real, World
“Going outside is highly overrated.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: outside, Outdoors, electronics
“Whenever I saw the sun, I reminded myself that I was looking at a star. One of over a hundred billion in our galaxy. A galaxy that was just one of billions of other galaxies in the observable universe. This helped me keep things in perspective.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: Stars, Sun, Universe, Perspective
“I was watching a collection of vintage '80s cereal commercials when I paused to wonder why cereal manufacturers no longer included toy prizes inside every box. It was a tragedy, in my opinion. Another sign that civilization was going straight down the tubes.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: cereal, civilization, decline
“People who live in glass houses should shut the fuck up.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
Tagged: insults, Silence, Vulnerable
“No one in the world gets what they want and that is beautiful.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: Disappointment, beauty, Life
“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.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: Reality, Technology, Happiness
“One person can keep a secret, but not two.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: Secrets, People, Gossip
“No matter where you go, there you are.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: Life, travel, destination
“It’s not useless, and neither am I.”
— Ernest Cline, Armada
Tagged: useless, meaningful, Worth
“We spread across the entire planet like an unstoppable virus.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: humanity, humans, virus
“You cannot escape your destiny.”
— Ernest Cline, Armada
Tagged: Destiny, Escape, Fate
“If I was feeling depressed or frustrated about my lot in life, all I had to do was tap the Player One button, and my worries would instantly slip away as my mind focused itself on the relentless pixelated onslaught on the screen in front of me. There, inside the game's two-dimensional universe, life was simple: It's just you against the machine. Move with your left hand, shoot with your right, and try to stay alive as long as possible.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: Video Games, Escapism, Depression
“I would argue that masturbation is the human animal's most important adaptation. The very cornerstone of our technological civilization. Our hands evolved to grip tools, all right—including our own. You see, thinkers, inventors, and scientists are usually geeks, and geeks have a harder time getting laid than anyone. Without the built-in sexual release valve provided by masturbation, it's doubtful that early humans would have ever mastered the secrets of fire or discovered the wheel. And you can bet that Galileo, Newton, and Einstein never would have made their discoveries if they hadn't first been able to clear their heads by slapping the salami (or "knocking a few protons off the old hydrogen atom"). The same goes for Marie Curie. Before she discovered radium, you can be certain she first discovered the little man in the canoe.”
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel
Tagged: masturbation, inventions, Technology
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