Ernest Cline Quotes

″‘Competition brings out the best in me.‘”

“A gifted human player could always triumph over the game’s AI, because software couldn’t improvise.”

“Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest.”

“I’d heard that if you accessed the simulation with a new state-of-the-art immersion rig, it was almost impossible to tell the OASIS from reality.”

“Even though it was initially marketed as a new kind of massively multiplayer online game, the OASIS quickly evolved into a new way of life.”

″[OASIS] was much more than a game or an entertainment platform.”

“I no longer cared that we were supposed to be rivals.”

“Anonymity was one of the major perks of the OASIS.”

″‘If I win [...] I’m going to make sure everyone on this planet has enough to eat. Once we tackle world hunger, then we can figure out how to fix the environment and solve the energy crisis.‘”

“Our conversations were now stilted and reserved, as if [Aech and I] were both afraid of revealing some key piece of information the other might be able to use.”

“Growing up as a human being on the planet Earth in the twenty-first century was a real kick in the teeth. Existentially speaking.”

“The real world sucked.”

“Things used to be awesome, but now they’re kinda terrifying.”

″‘It’s not about the money. It’s about what I could do with it.‘”

″[Halliday] was the videogame designer responsible for creating the OASIS, a massively multiplayer online game that had gradually evolved into the globally networked virtual reality most of humanity now used on a daily basis.”

“Logging into a chat room was a little like being in two places at once.”

“A new subculture was born, composed of the millions of people who now devoted every free moment of their lives to searching for Halliday’s egg.”

“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.”

″‘No one ever looks anything like their avatar.‘”

″‘The reason so many people are starving is because we’ve wrecked the planet. The Earth is dying, you know? It’s time to leave.‘”