Ready Player One Quotes
"I was jolted awake by the sound of gunfire in one of the neighboring stacks."
"When I played the classics, I did so with a determined sort of reverence."
"The worst thing about being a kid was that no one told me the truth about my situation."
"I wish someone had just said: 'Here’s the deal, Wade. You’re something called a ‘human being.'"
"My generation had never known a world without the OASIS."
"The OASIS kept me sane. It was my playground and my preschool, a magical place where anything was possible."
"I knew the crush I had on Art3mis was both silly and ill-advised."
"I was the only child of two teenagers, both refugees who’d met in the stacks where I’d grown up."
"People rarely used their real names online. Anonymity was one of the major perks of the OASIS."
"Spacecraft that could travel at light speed were rare, and they required fuel to operate."
"Magic would function in some zones and not in others."
"The only thing to be found here were thousands of identical school campuses."
"If you stayed in safe zones, like Ludus, you didn’t have to worry about your avatar getting robbed, kidnapped, or killed."
"Traveling around inside the OASIS wasn’t just costly—it was also dangerous."
"I’d devoted all of my free time to learning as much as I possibly could about James Halliday."
"James Donovan Halliday was born on June 12, 1972, in Middletown, Ohio."
"Before long, billions of people around the world were working and playing in the OASIS every day."
"In the OASIS, you could become whomever and whatever you wanted to be, without ever revealing your true identity."
"Gregarious Simulation Systems elevated the MMO concept to an entirely new level."
"There's no need to be rude. The Sixers are really no different than a Gunter clan, albeit a well-funded one."
"You know, contrary to popular belief, the OASIS really won't change that drastically when IOI takes control of it."
"I can’t sell out to the Sixers. If I did, and they did somehow manage to win the contest, I’d be the one responsible."
"I wouldn’t want for you to accidentally drop any hints."
"I want to be in charge of the whole shebang. Chief of operations. El Numero Uno."
"You can’t buy me. So piss off. Adios. Goodbye."
"Your trailer is currently wired with a large quantity of high explosives."
"If you log out of this chatlink session, you will die within a few seconds. Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Mr. Watts?"
"I hadn’t really considered any of this, maybe because I’d never really believed I would actually be in this position."
"Your first instinct right now might be to log out and make a run for it. I urge you not to make that mistake."
"Before I learned to conceal my real-world identity."
"You’re bluffing," I heard myself say. But I didn’t think he was. Not at all."
"This is much more than a videogame contest. It always has been."
"You’re never going to find Halliday’s egg. You know why? Because he was smarter than all of you put together."
"This isn’t my real body, Wade. Or my real face."
"We exist as nothing but raw personality in here."
"I’m in love with your mind—with the person you are. I couldn’t care less about the packaging."
"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."
"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."
"I felt no shame about masturbating. Thanks to Anorak’s Almanac, I now thought of it as a normal bodily function, as necessary and natural as sleeping or eating."
"Running system agent software was a little like having a virtual personal assistant—one that also functioned as a voice-activated interface with your computer."
"Each component of my rig was a bar in the cell where I had willingly imprisoned myself."
"In real life, I was nothing but an antisocial hermit. A recluse. A pale-skinned pop culture–obsessed geek."
"No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful."
"Most of the time, reality is a prison. But the beauty of reality is that we can bend it."
"I spent the next twenty-four hours in a frantic funk, obsessively checking the Scoreboard every five seconds, expecting the end to come at any moment."
"The only problem is that you’re a complete fucking moron."
"We are the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx."
"I held up the wrapper and took another look at it."
"The only way out of a gate was to go through it. Or die."
"I tried to prepare myself for what I knew was about to happen next."
"I grinned at the absurd Arthurian image of the guitar in the stone."
"The moment the lights in my hab-unit went out, I felt energized and wide awake."
"Once I’d finished decrypting the data, I examined it all thoroughly."
"I saw people clustered on every street corner and in every vacant lot, huddled around burning barrels and portable fuel-cell heaters."
"Using one of the turncoat’s exploits, I performed a quick hack that caused my eargear and hab-unit cameras to display the archived video from my first night of indenturement instead of a live feed."
"I kept expecting to be discovered and locked out of the system, but it never happened."
"Then, last night, just before I’d succumbed to exhaustion, I’d finally managed to navigate my way through the intranet’s labyrinth of firewalls."
"They had things I’d never seen. Things I didn’t even know existed."
"It made my grail diary look like a set of CliffsNotes."
"I focused on isolating the data related to Castle Anorak and the forces the Sixers had positioned in and around it."
"I put on the entertainment center’s visor and gloves, then stretched out on my mattress."
"The visor presented me with a three-dimensional view of the Sixers’ database."
"I copied the really interesting stuff over to my flash drive, to (hopefully) study later."
"The only reason they hadn’t been able to locate me was because I’d taken the paranoia-induced precaution of leasing a direct fiber-optic connection to the OASIS from my apartment complex."
"It was like being inside a giant hamster ball."
"My avatar was buffed to the eyeballs and armed to the teeth."
"I didn’t witness it firsthand, but I can tell you with some certainty that this is what happened next."
"I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world."
"As terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real."
"I’m entrusting the care of the OASIS to you now, Parzival."
"It was an artifact, but I never knew its purpose. Not until now. Turns out it gave me an extra life."
"Greetings," I said. "This is Wade Watts, also known as Parzival."
"We should all be entering the gate together."
"I know how the three of you must feel right now. It isn’t fair, the way this has played out."
"I want you guys to know something. If I reach the egg, I’m going to split the prize money equally among the four of us."
"I want to let the whole world know that if and when I find Halliday’s Easter egg, I hereby vow to split my winnings equally with Art3mis, Aech, and Shoto."