24 Quotes From Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
One of my favourite science-fiction books, Ready Player One first published in 2011 and has since sold more than 1 million copies worldwide. In 2018 it was even adapted into a movie by Steven Spielberg, and a second book Ready Player Two was published in 2020.
Here’s the synopsis:
It's the year 2044, and the real world has become an ugly place. We're out of oil. We've wrecked the climate. Famine, poverty, and disease are widespread.
Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes this depressing reality by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia where you can be anything you want to be, where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.
And like most of humanity, Wade is obsessed by the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this alternate reality: OASIS founder James Halliday, who dies with no heir, has promised that control of the OASIS - and his massive fortune - will go to the person who can solve the riddles he has left scattered throughout his creation.
For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that the riddles are based in the culture of the late twentieth century. And then Wade stumbles onto the key to the first puzzle.
Suddenly, he finds himself pitted against thousands of competitors in a desperate race to claim the ultimate prize, a chase that soon takes on terrifying real-world dimensions - and that will leave both Wade and his world profoundly changed.”
Quotes About Life
"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."
“No one in the world gets what they want and that is beautiful.”
“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.”
“For a bunch of hairless apes, we've actually managed to invent some pretty incredible things.”
“She made me laugh. She made me think. She changed the way I saw the world.”
“You'd be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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!”
“So I'm supposed to believe you're one of those mythical guys who only cares about a woman's personality, and not about the package it comes in?”
“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.”
“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.”
“It was the dawn of new era, one where most of the human race now spent all of their free time inside a videogame.”
“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.’”
“I was just another sad, lost, lonely soul, wasting his life on a glorified videogame.”
Quotes About Video Games
“Being human totally sucks most of the time. Videogames are the only thing that make life bearable”
“Don't you want to build a huge interstellar spaceship, load it full of videogames, junk food, and comfy couches, and then get the hell out of here?”
“All the intervening layers slipped away, and I lost myself in the game within the game.”
“I burned through all of my extra lives in a matter of minutes, and my two least-favorite words appeared on the screen: GAME OVER.”
“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.”
“I’d designed my avatar’s face and body to look, more or less, like my own. 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. But aside from these minor details, we looked more or less identical”
“Going outside is highly overrated.”
“‘You don’t live in the real world, Z. From what you've told me, I don’t think you ever have. You're like me. You live inside this illusion.’ She motioned to our virtual surroundings.”
“These three words were always the last thing an OASIS user saw before leaving the real world and entering the virtual one: READY PLAYER ONE”
You can buy a copy of Ready Player One on Amazon here.