“Come with me, and you’ll be in a world of pure imagination.” —Willy Wonka, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
“A world where the limits of reality are your own imagination.” —Wade Watts, Ready Player One (trailer)
“On Saturday morning, you got to stay in your PJs, plant yourself on the living room rug, and revel in a cavalcade of cartoons, sugar-infused breakfast cereal, video games, and the unbridled possibilities of your youthful imagination.” —Wade Watts, Ready Player One (manuscript)
“No, his mind is not for rent …” —Rush, “Tom Sawyer”
“ … in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.” —Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
“I had every single Rush song, album, bootleg, and music video ever made. I had high-res scans of all their liner notes and album artwork. Every frame of Rush concert footage in existence. Every radio and television interview the band had ever done. Unabridged biographies on each band member, along with copies of their side projects and solo work.” —Wade Watts, Ready Player One (novel)
“ ‘Referential mania,’ Herman Brink had called it. In these very rare cases, the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. … Everything is a cipher, and of everything, he is the theme.” —Vladimir Nabokov, “Signs and Symbols”
“He was known to fire longtime employees for not recognizing an obscure line of movie dialogue he’d quoted, or if he discovered that they weren’t familiar with one of his favorite cartoons, comic books, or video games.” —Ernest Cline, Ready Player One (novel)
“This is Superman. He’s a lot like you.” —Hogarth Hughes, The Iron Giant
“Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes.” —Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
“… do we simply want to hear the litany of our childhood repeated back to us like an endless lullaby for the rest of our lives?” —Laura Hudson, review of Armada
“Teddy told me that in Greek, ‘nostalgia’ literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ ” —Don Draper, Mad Men
“I’ll kill you slow!” —Freddy Krueger, A Nightmare on Elm Street
“What happens to us in the future? Do we become assholes or something?” —Marty McFly, Back to the Future.
