Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “I held the phone close to my heart, caught my breath. I could have squealed with delight. If you’ve been in love, you know this kind of exquisite anticipation, this ecstasy. I was on the brink of something, and I could feel it. I suppose I was in love with Rebecca. She awoke in my heart some long-sleeping dragon. I’ve never felt that fire burning like that again. That day was without a doubt the most exciting day of my life.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

452. “I drank a bottle down and had Johnson pay for a few more and I opened the next one and passed it to Johnson and he took a swig and winced and laughed and passed it back to me, and that was it.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

453. “The bandit didn’t struggle or curse. He said only ‘God forgive you’, the same words Marek had said to him a few days earlier.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

454. “Hell was the only destination she ever used in her metaphors.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

455. “When you die, leave not a trace. Sweep up any evidence of your existence.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

456. “I love you.” Maybe she did, and that’s why I hated her.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

457. “She was empty. ‘I am an object in the room,’ she had told herself. ‘That is all that I am.’ This belief spared her the agony of her own intelligence while she was a slave to the nuns.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

458. “I am glad that my love is greater than your vanity.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

460. “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

461. “I would miss that old library. I couldn’t realize at the time how those books had saved me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

462. “That was how life seemed to be finding things to do to pass the time. The less I’d looked at the clock, the better I knew I’d enjoyed my day.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

463. “He knew how to manipulate me – I had to respect him for that at least, however much I hated him for it.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

464. “There was to be no narrative that I could follow, no pieces for me to put together. Even a shade of cuiosity could sabotage my mission to clear my mind, purge my associations, refresh and renew the cells in my brain, my eyes, my nerves, my heart.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

465. “I’m not saying he was an idiot. He was just like me: anything good made him want to die. That’s a characteristic some smart people have.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

467. “I heard a child ask his young mother, pointing to a bird that looked like a psychedelic crow. Its feathers were iridescent black, a rainbow reflected in the gleaming darkness, eyes bright white and alive, vigilant. “A grackle,” the woman replied.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

468. “I wanted the old half life back.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

469. “I didn’t want her to leave. The white glare off the overhead light gleamed across her collarbones. She was beautiful, with all her nerves and all her complicated, circuitous feelings and contradictions and fears.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

470. “But Rebecca was no hussy. She was divine.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

471. “He had flattered me, and reminded me that my stupidity and vanity were still well intact.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

472. “Days slipped by obliquely, with little to remember... Nothing seemed really real. Sleeping, waking, it all collided into one gray, monotonous plane ride through the clouds.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

475. “Once Villiam caught his breath, he thanked the nun, promised her fine hospitality as long as she cared to stay, and then went on eating, a bit more carefully this time, engaging the priest in a long discussion of hell, its landscape, its economy, what kind of house the Devil lived in, how he managed his servants, and how he had escaped into the realm of Earth. And then he asked, as though he might be serious, ‘How long will God keep heaven’s gate closed? Hypothetically speaking.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

476. “The sound of tires on the wet pavement. A window was open so I could hear it. The sweet smell of spring crept in. The world was out there still, but I hadn’t looked at it in months. It was too much to consider it all, stretching out, a circular planet covered in creatures and things growing, all of it spinning slowly on an axis created by what-some freak accident? It seemed implausible. The world could be flat just as easily as it could be round. Who could prove anything?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

477. “She was a slave to vanity and status, which was not unusual in a place like Manhattan, but I found her desperation especially irritating. It made it hard for me to respect her intelligence.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

478. “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

479. “She workshipped me, but she also hated me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

480. “I desperately hoped I could avoid ever having to resemble a grown woman. I didn’t see that any good could come of that.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

481. “Up on my floor, I opened the garbage chute in the hallway and stuffed the roses down, but I kept the card. However much Ping Xi disgusted me – I didn’t respect him or his art, I didn’t want to know him, I didn’t want him to know me – he had flattered, and reminded me of my stupidity and vanity were still well intact. A good lesson.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

482. “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

483. “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

484. “And he explained something he thought most people didn’t understand about intelligence. “It comes from the heart,” he said, beating his chest with his fist. “It has a lot to do with your blood type. And magnets.” That one gave me pause.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

485. “Life was chaos. There were no rewards. Best to make the time tolerable, at least.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

486. “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

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. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

490. “A handsome man must be terribly cruel to generate such discomfort in the people around him.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

493. “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

494. “Above the altar a wooden man hung magically bleeding, his head bowed and face hurt but not unhappy. That was God, they told me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

495. “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

496. “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

497. “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

498. “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

499. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh