Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “What could be cowardly about the color yellow? Nothing.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

452. “Her greed would unburden me of my own vanity.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

453. “My favorite days were the ones that barely registered.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

454. “Pain is not the only touchstone for growth.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

455. “What I mean to say is that I was not fundamentally unattractive. I was just invisible.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

456. “The very fact that other people moved their bowels filled me with awe.” p. 110-111.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

457. “She packed everything into the shopping bags with the urgent efficiency of someone building a sand castle at sundown, as the tide comes in. Like a dream you know will end. If I move fast enough, I won’t wake the gods.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

458. “I hoped that they’d had some respect for the stuff they were immortalizing.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

459. “He wasn’t interested in understanding himself or evolving. He just wanted to shock people. And he wanted people to love and despise him for it. His audience, of course, would never truly be shocked. People were only delighted at his concepts. He was an art-world hack. But he was successful.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

460. “The videos described were of me talking into the camera, seeming to narrate some personal stories-I cry in one- but Ping Xi had dubbed everything over. Instead of my voice, you heard long, angry voice mails Ping Xi’s mother had left him in Cantonese.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

461. “I had the feeling, like alone on the road at night, that there was something watching me, something waiting for me to falter, something just hidden in the shadows waiting to pounce. That was God.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

462. “It’s a romantic story and it may not be accurate at this point since I’ve gone over it again and again for years whenever I’ve felt it necessary or useful to cry. Looking.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

463. “Would she suddenly grow into maturity and discard me as a relic from a failed past, the way I’d hoped to do to her when my year of sleep was over?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

464. “He made a living sitting still, just thinking things and writing them down, convincing others that what he thought and wrote was correct, and in this way, the world was supposed to change? His work was that powerful? I was sick of theory. What mattered was what a person did, not what they went around pontificating about!”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

465. “Rebecca had invited me into her home, allowed me to see her in her natural state, however slovenly and nervous. That was friendship.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

466. “I tried to remember my life, flipping through Polaroids in my mind.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

467. “You seem depressed,” she said with concern. I said I wasn’t depressed; I was just bored. I hadn’t considered that if the only thing that keeps you going all day is knowing you’ll get to turn on the TV after dinner, you probably are depressed.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

468. “It all seemed so trite. “Why tell stories?” he wondered aloud. “As soon as something is over, that’s it. Why revive it constantly? Things happen, and then more things, inevitably, happen next. So?” He shrugged. His hands trembled. He tried to smile, but he was now, indeed, terribly overcome.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

469. “I could see they were connected to something that had immense power over them. This was what happened when the mindspace was the internet, I thought. One loses one’s sense of self. One’s mind can go anywhere. And at the same time, the mind becomes lame when it is connected to something so consuming.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

470. “What brings you here?” she asked. “Depression?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

471. “The worst crime I could commit in his eyes was to do anything for my own pleasure, anything outside of my daughterly duties. Evidence of a will of my own was seen as the ultimate betrayal.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

472. “I slept around in spurts, going out more, then less. Nothing ever panned out in terms of “love.” Reva often spoke about “settling down.” That sounded like death to me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

473. “I was born into privilege,” I told Ping Xi. “I am not going to squander that. I’m not a moron.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

474. “I never got a good look at Dr. Tuttle’s eyes. I suspect that they were crazy eyes, black and shiny, like a crow’s. The pen she used was long and purple and had a purple feather at the end of it.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

475. “My father had warned when I’d started there at age twenty-one, naive beyond reproach, that the most dangerous individuals in a prison are not the criminals but the very people who work there. I can confirm this to be true. Those were perhaps the wisest words my father ever told me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

476. “Suspicion invites danger, doesn’t it? Keep the imagination soft and happy, and only good things will come.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

477. “And then, as if I’d summoned her with my mundane cynicism, Reva was knocking on my door once again.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

478. “But of course she was dead wrong. We New Englanders are uptight for sure, but we have strong minds. We use our imaginations effectively. We don’t waste our brains on magical notions or useless frills, but we do have the ability to fantasize.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

479. “A serious rest. My mouth watered. Good strong American sleep. Those pills would scrape out the sludge of Infermiterol left in my mind. Then I’d feel better. Then I’d be set. I’d live easy. I’d think easy. My brain would glide. I looked at the assortment of pills in my palm. Good-bye, bad dream. I wished I had my Polaroid camera to document the scene.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

480. “His loyalty was to the gin, and his twisted war against the hoodlums, his imaginary enemies, the ghosts.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

481. “She was probably my age, but she looked like a woman with a hundred years of suffering behind her-no love, no transformations, no joy, just junk food and bad television, ugly, mean-spirited men creaking in and out of stuffy rooms to take advantage of her womb and impassive heft. One of these obese offspring would soon overtake her throne...”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

482. “They focused on ‘abstract ideas’ and developed drinking problems to blot out the self-loathing they preferred to call ‘existential ennui’.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

483. “It was easy to ignore things that different concern me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

484. “My mother’s body stayed alive for exactly three days. Even with a tube down her throat, a machine taped to her face to keep her breathing, she was still pretty. She was still prim. “Her organs are shutting down,” the doctor explained. System failure.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

485. “The obvious truth was that Reva had loved her mother in a way that I hadn’t loved mine.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

486. “Time was no immemorial. Things were just things.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

487. “I recall waking up to two shiny nickels under my pillow once. What shocked me was not the transformation from tooth to silver, but the idea that I had slept through the disturbance of my mother or father sneaking in during the night, that I had been unconscious, completely unaware, vulnerable. I remember my question that morning – what else had they done to me in my sleep? I’ve often wondered about everything I may have slept through, what arguments, what secrets.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

488. “Try to sleep on your side when possible. There was recently a study in Australia that said that when you sleep on your back, you’re more likely to have nightmares about drowning. It’s not conclusive, of course, since they’re on the opposite side of the Earth. So actually, you might want to try sleeping on your stomach instead, and see what that does.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

489. “This woman was beautiful, and looked vaguely familiar, in the way all beautiful people look familiar. So within 30 seconds I decided she must be an idiot.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

490. “And he was short. I had never dated a short man before. The thought crossed my mind: Perhaps I am learning humility. Perhaps this man is the answer to my prayers.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

491. “Sometimes Waldemar loves me too much. He thinks it is better I stay with him on Earth, rather than be happy in the other place without him.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

492. “I’d never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

493. “That was how I imagined my anatomy back then, brain like tangled yarn, body like an empty vessel, private parts like some strange foreign country. But I was careful shutting the door, of course. I didn’t really want to die.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

494. “Things might be theoretical, that was true. I may be imagining it all, but it still hurt. It was still sad to lose someone you loved.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

495. “The modern age has forced us to live unnatural lives.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

496. “We need some solid stuff to hold on to. When I look at you, I see fine loose threads, like a silk cushion that has been rubbed for a hundred years, poor girl.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

497. “God had not appeared to her in all that time. So she preferred to stay faithless rather than hold on to a fantasy. It.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

498. “Sleep is key. Most people need upwards of fourteen hours or so. The modern age has forced us to live unnatural lives. Busy, busy, busy. Go, go, go. You probably work too much.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

499. “Of course, I was grateful to be spared the humiliation of a patronizing confrontation by a dozen young women who would probably have just shamed me for not “being more open.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

500. “She thought she was sophisticated – she liked fine clothes, good liquor – but she knew nothing about art. She didn’t read anything but romance novels. There were no freshly cut flowers around the house. She mostly watched TV and smoked in bed all day, as far as I could tell. That was her ‘culture’.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh