Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

2. “People truly engaged in life have messy houses.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

3. “My brain hurts and I cry all the time. I don’t want to be here on Earth for one moment longer.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

4. “I felt I needed to hide a little. My mind needed a smaller world to roam.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

5. “There is nothing more heartbreaking than a squandered opportunity, a missed chance. I knew about stuff like that. I’d been young once. So many dreams had been dashed. But I dashed them myself. I wanted to be safe, whole, have a future of certainty. One makes mistakes when there is confusion between having a future at all and having the future one wants.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

6. “It’s like the SAT’s. You don’t even exist if you’re below 1400.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

7. “I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

8. “It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

9. “There was majesty and grace in the pace of the swaying branches of the willows. There was kindness. Pain is not the only touchstone for growth, I said to myself. My sleep had worked. I was soft and calm and felt things. This was good. This was my life now.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

10. “For a moment I felt joyful, and then I felt completely exhausted.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

11. “Here is how I spend my days now. I live in a beautiful place. I sleep in a beautiful bed. I eat beautiful food. I go for walks through beautiful places. I care for people deeply. At night my bed is full of love, because I alone am in it. I cry easily, from pain and pleasure, and I don’t apologize for that. In the mornings I step outside and I’m thankful for another day. It took me many years to arrive at such a life.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

12. “My first impression of him was that he was free spirited, clever, funny. That proved to be completely inaccurate.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

13. “Those people with perfect houses are simply obsessed with death. A house that is so well maintained, furnished with good-looking furniture of high quality, decorated tastefully, everything in its place, becomes a living tomb. People truly engaged in life have messy houses.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

14. “Idealism without consequences is the pathetic dream of every spoiled brat, I suppose.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

15. “Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart – this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then – that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

16. “Someone said once that pupils were just empty space, black holes, twin caves of infinite nothingness. “When something disappears, that’s usually where it disappears – into the black holes in our eyes.” I couldn’t remember who had said it. I watched my reflection disappear in the steam.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

17. “The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn’t exist yet.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

18. “Dudes” reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskine pocket notebook.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

19. “I’m not a junkie or something,” I said defensively. “I’m taking some time off. This is my year of rest and relaxation.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

20. “Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

21. “I can’t point to any one event that resulted in my decision to go into hibernation. Initially, I just wanted some downers to drown out my thoughts and judgments, since the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything. I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

22. “I felt myself float up and away, higher and higher into the ether until my body was just an anecdote, a symbol, a portrait hanging in another world.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

23. “Education is directly proportional to anxiety, as you’ve probably learned, having gone to Columbia.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

24. “I couldn’t be bothered to deal with fixing things. I preferred to wallow in the problem, dream of better days.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

25. “I was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you’d feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

26. “The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

27. “This was the beauty of sleep – reality detached itself and appeared in my mind as casually as a movie or a dream.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

28. “It was lunacy, this idea, that I could sleep myself into a new life. Preposterous. But there I was, approaching the depths of my journey.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

29. “We don’t forget things, OK? We just choose to ignore them. Can you accept responsibility for your memory lapse and move on?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

30. “I always thought it was pathetic that Reva had chosen to stay in the area after graduation, but passing through it in the cab, in my frenzied state of despair, I understood: there was stability in living in the past.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

31. “The idea that my brains could be untangled, straightened out, and thus refashioned into a state of peace and sanity was a comforting fantasy.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

32. “I loved Reva, but I didn’t like her anymore. We’d been friends since college, long enough that all we had left in common was our history together, a complex circuit of resentment, memory, jealousy, denial, and a few dresses I’d let Reva borrow, which she’d promised to dry clean and return but never did.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

33. “Daily meditation has been shown to cure insomnia in rats.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

34. “Nothing seemed really real. Sleeping, waking, it all collided into one gray, monotonous plane ride through the clouds. I didn’t talk to myself in my head. There wasn’t much to say. This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was my dream.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

35. “I felt both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you’d feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide. Not that what I was doing was suicide. In fact, it was the opposite of suicide. My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought it was going to save my life.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

36. “Reva was like the pills I took. They turned everything, even hatred, even love, into fluff I could bat away. And that was exactly what I wanted – my emotions passing like headlights that shine softly through a window, sweep past me, illuminate something vaguely familiar, then fade and leave me in the dark again.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

37. “A grown woman is like a coyote – she can get by on very little. Men are more like house cats. Leave them alone for too long and they’ll die of sadness.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

38. “It’s easy to tell the dirtiest minds – look for the cleanest fingernails.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

39. “A friend is someone who helps you hide the body – that.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

40. “I wondered if I might be dead, and I felt no sorrow, only worry over the afterlife, if it was going to be just like this, just as boring. If I’m dead, I thought, let this be the end. The silliness.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

41. “I hated them for not worshiping me. Had they no idea of my sacrifice? There I was, perfectly wonderful, and nobody would see that.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

42. “I thought that if I did normal things – held down a job, for example – I could starve off the part of me that hated everything. If I had been a man, I may have turned to a life of crime.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

43. “I could plan to do something and then find myself doing the opposite.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

44. “OH, SLEEP. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness. I was not a narcoleptic – I never fell asleep when I didn’t want to. I was more.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

45. “Now write this down because I have a feeling you’re too psychotic to remember: Saturday, January twentieth, at two o’clock. And try the Infermiterol. Bye-bye.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

46. “Some families are so sick, so twisted, the only way out is for someone to die.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

47. “Fashion’s for the fools, I know now, but I’ve learned that it’s good to be foolish from time to time. It keeps your spirit young.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

48. “You can see wealth in people no matter what they’re wearing. It’s in the cut of their chins, a certain gloss to the skin, a drag and pause to their responsiveness. When poor people hear a loud noise, they whip their heads around. Wealthy people finish their sentences, then just glance back.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

49. “Life was fragile and fleeting and one had to be cautious, sure, but I would risk death if it meant I could sleep all day and become a whole new person.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

50. “I found my way into the Met one afternoon in early September. I guess I wanted to see what other people had done with their lives, people who had made art alone, who had stared long and hard at bowls of fruit.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh