Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “The heart is a moody, greedy thing, I suppose.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

452. “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

453. “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

454. “The air in there was heavy with the perfume of cheap cleaning detergents and mildew.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

455. “On May 28, I came to, knowing this was the last time I would perform my habitual ablutions and take the Infermiterol.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

456. “I really despised him, everyone.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

457. “I’d never planned on working all my life. I’d had this fantasy that I’d get married and suddenly find a calling beyond the humiliating need to make a living. Art or charity work, babies – something like that.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

458. “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

459. “Isn’t it only fair that I should get to choose how I’ll die? I wouldn’t die like my father did, passive and quiet while the cancer ate him alive. At least my mother did things her own way. I’d never thought to admire her before for that. At least she had guts. At least she took matters into her own hands.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

461. “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

462. “But as a young woman in X-ville, I had no idea that other people – men or women – felt things as deeply as I did.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

463. “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

464. “It was the particular sadness of a young woman who has lost her mother–complex and angry and soft, yet oddly hopeful.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

466. “What scared her were other people and their immovable selfishness.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

467. “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

468. “The dark, icy night sparkled behind her, the snow and stars a galaxy of hope and wonder with her at its center. She was so alive and lovely.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

469. “She had indeed seen death and she was not afraid of it. What scared her were other people and their immovable selfishness.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

470. “And what did Grigor really want from Villiam? An apology? All lords were corrupt. If he wanted to live freely, he would have to live like Ina lived, in a hovel. Poverty had its limitations, but if you had nothing, there was nothing to be stolen. He.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

471. “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

472. “I’m not a junkie or something,” I said defensively. “I’m taking some time off. This is my year of rest and relaxation.” “Lucky you,” Reva said. “I wouldn’t mind taking time off from work to loaf around, watch movies, and snooze all day, but I’m not complaining. I just don’t have that luxury.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

473. “In the moments waiting to lose consciousness, I imagined Trevor on one knee, proposing to his current lady friend. The self-satisfaction. The stupidity of wanting something “forever.” I almost felt sorry for him, for her.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

474. “I liked looking at things other people had let go of. Maybe the pillowcase I was sniffing had been used on an old man’s deathbed. Maybe this lamp had sat on an end table in an apartment for fifty years. I could imagine all the scenes it had lit: a couple making love on the sofa, thousands of TV dinners, a baby’s tantrums, the honeyed glow of whiskey in an Elks Lodge tumbler. Goodwill indeed.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

475. “Perhaps I was lucky after all. It’s very hard to measure out, in hindsight, who had it worse than whom.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

476. “This was Yorkville, the Upper East Side. People were uptight. When I shuffled through the lobby in my pajamas and slippers on my way to the bodega, I felt like I was committing a crime, but I didn’t care.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

477. “Oxytocin is a hormone released during copulation,” my father went on, staring at the blank wall behind me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

478. “But really, by this point, I think I had resigned myself to fate. No stupid movie would save me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

479. “Children built snowmen in their front lawns, played in the yard of the public library. I would miss that old library. I couldn’t realize at the time how those books had saved me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

480. “So you’re not sick?” “I’m resting.” I lay down on the sofa to demonstrate.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

481. “Each time Ping Xi came over, he was to mark off the days on a calendar hanging on the door to my bedroom. Every three days, I’d wake up, look at the calendar, eat, drink, bathe, et cetera. I would only spend one hour awake each time. I did the math: for the next four months, 120 days total, I would spend only forty hours in a conscious state. “Sweet dreams,” said Ping Xi.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

482. “I am interested in disgust.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

483. “The bed was a king, low to the ground, and whenever I slept in it, I felt very far away from the world, like I was in a spaceship or on the moon. I missed that bed. The stiff blankness of my mother’s eggshell sheets.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

484. “Real insomniacs suffer hallucinations and lost time and usually have poor memory. It can make life very confusing.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

485. “I suppose a part of me wished when I put my key in the door, it would magically open into a different apartment, a different life, a place so bright with joy and excitement that I’d be temporarily blinded when I first saw it.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

486. “Boys will be boys,” is all I could think to say. Rebecca just laughed.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

487. “Maybe I did take some pleasure in aiding her self-destruction by buying her booze, but I didn’t want my mother to die. It wasn’t like that.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

488. “Lying on the grass outside a tennis arena, he held my face toward the sun, stared sideways at my eyeballs, and began to cry. He told me I was the sign he’d been waiting for and, like looking into a crystal ball, he’d just read a private message from God in the silvery vortex of my left pupil.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

489. “They’re mostly pleasant visions, ethereal spirits, celestial light patterns, angels, friendly ghosts. Sprites. Nymphs. Glitter. Hallucinating is completely harmless. And it happens mostly to Asians. What, may I ask, is your ethnic background?” “English, French, Swedish, German.” “You’ll be fine.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

490. “My family isn’t religious or anything. They just like to sit around and eat a lot. My aunts and uncles drove in from New Jersey.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

491. “Reva was a magnet for my angst. She sucked it right out of me. I was a Zen Buddhist monk when she was around. I was above fear, above desire, above worldly concerns in general. I could live in the now in her company. I had no past or present. No thoughts. I was too evolved for all her jibber-jabber. And too cool. Reva could get angry, impassioned, depressed, ecstatic. I wouldn’t. I refused to. I would feel nothing, be a blank state.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

492. “Then, on a Sunday morning, my father was suddenly lucid and told me matter-of-factly that he would die in the afternoon.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

493. “What could be cowardly about the color yellow? Nothing.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

495. “I’d stay home through the blizzard and get some hard sleeping done. I’d return to my old rhythm, my daily rituals. I needed the stability of my familiar routine.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

496. “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

497. “I don’t like the term ‘dream journal,’” she told me at our in-person appointment in June. “I prefer ’night vision log.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

499. “She’d done everything so many times in her life, she drifted between now and then, often getting lost in between.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

500. “Psychic diseases get passed around in confined spaces. I sense your mind is too porous.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh