Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Weekends I was only awake for a few hours a day. And when I was awake, I wasn’t fully so, but in a kind of murk, a dim state between the real and the dream. I got sloppy and lazy at work, grayer, emptier, less there. This pleased me, but having to do things became very problematic. When people spoke, I had to repeat what they’d said in my mind before understanding it. I told Dr. Tuttle I was having trouble concentrating. She said it was probably due to “brain mist.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

452. “A little lying never hurt anybody. It kept the bounds of what one person was distinct from what another person was.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

453. “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

454. “To hell with God. And to hell with your father.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

457. “No man is worth paying for,” I told her.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

460. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

463. “Maybe she should keep the baby, I thought. Maybe a baby would wake her up.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

464. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

466. “His own struggles seemed like petty complications, meaningless snags in the dull itinerary that was his life. Why couldn’t he live by instinct and appetite, be primitive, be free?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

467. “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

468. “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

469. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

471. “I really despised him, everyone.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

472. “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

473. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

475. “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

476. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— 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. “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

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

485. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

489. “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

490. “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

491. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

493. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

495. “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

496. “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

497. “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

498. “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

499. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh