Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

454. “Strange, he thought next, that fire hurts to the touch. Fire gives light. Shouldn’t the darkness hurt instead? Hell ought to be pure darkness. Nothingness.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

455. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

457. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

460. “An overconfident sleuth could misinterpret evidence. She might only see the clues that would lead her to the solution she’d first had in mind. And I wanted to be surprised by what I discovered.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

461. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

464. “I simply can’t have roommates. I like my own space.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

465. “I doubt she deserved the amount of hatred I directed at her, but I loathed just about everybody back then.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

466. “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

467. “There was a time I knew there was a god hearing my thoughts and I was careful what I let get said and there was a time the shame of what I heard up there made me bang my head against the wall.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

468. “Talking to Reva about misery was insufferable. ‘Look on the bright side,’ was what she wanted everyone to do.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

472. “It seemed the other horses didn’t like the blind one, like a wounded soldier who had seen too much and reminded them of their own possible fate.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

473. “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

474. “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

475. “There was something strange in her face, a blankness that made her hard to see. He didn’t believe that a man was something holy – the servants’ faith did not recognize holiness in human beings. They didn’t care for Jesus. Flesh was mortal. God was not. God was not alive. God was life itself. And life was invisible. This was why Clod felt he had to make art, to give proof of life.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

476. “Psychiatry has come a long way, into the spiritual realm. Into energies. There are deniers, certainly, but they all work for big oil. Now tell me about your most recent dreams.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

477. “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

478. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

480. “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

481. “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

482. “I left school and took the train up to see him the very next day, not because I thought it would mean so much to him to have me there, but to prove to my mother that I was a better person than she was: I was willing to be inconvenienced by someone else’s suffering.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

483. “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

484. “I took the note out and read it as a reminder of what she’d actually been like and how little she cared about me. It helped. Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

485. “Grigor looked around. Everything he could see – the great room, the finery, the food, the lord’s spectacular Christmas costume, none of it inspired him. It was not God’s fortune, but the bounty of a thief: Villiam hadn’t worked for his blessings. The villagers had.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

486. “There’s a rumor going around that the artist gets the dogs as puppies, raises them, then kills them when they’re the size he wants. He locks them in an industrial freezer because that’s the most humane way to euthanize them without compromising the look of the animal. When they thaw, he can get them into whatever position he wants.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

487. “He had expected the priest to be a large, virile northerner – he’d imagined that any man of authority must have blue eyes – but he looked like an average Lapvonian, only dressed in a long black robe.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

488. “Next to the vitamins, there was a contraption to measure your blood pressure and pulse. I sat in the seat of the machine, took my arm out of the sleeve of my coat and stuck it in for testing.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

490. “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

491. “He didn’t believe she could carry a child to term. She was too old – already twenty-eight – and too frail.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

492. “He was incapable of forgiveness because he was so addled by his own grief and grudges.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

493. “The silver key opened her apartment door. I walked inside. “Hello?” I could have sworn I smelled puke in the darkness.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

494. “Sometimes I stuck my finger down my throat. Plus I was always picking at my pimples. I covered the marks they made with girls’ liquid foundation, which I stole from Walgreens. The shade I used was called Classic Tan. I guess those were my only secrets.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

495. “Now let me ask you a technical question. Do you have any heroes?” “I guess Whoopi Goldberg is my hero.” “A family friend?” “She took care of me after my mother died,” I said. Who hadn’t heard of Whoopi Goldberg?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

496. “This is the story of how I disappeared.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

497. “I’d never been to the kind of party in the Polaroid photos.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

498. “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.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

499. “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.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

500. “Neither creation or sacrifice could lead a person to heaven.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh