Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “OH, SLEEP. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness. I was not a narcoleptic – I never fell asleep when I didn’t want to. I was more.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

52. “Now write this down because I have a feeling you’re too psychotic to remember: Saturday, January twentieth, at two o’clock. And try the Infermiterol. Bye-bye.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

53. “Life was fragile and fleeting and one had to be cautious, sure, but I would risk death if it meant I could sleep all day and become a whole new person.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

54. “Be careful with women,” he told me. “All they want is love and money.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

55. “Maybe they understood, in fact, that beauty and meaning had nothing to do with one another.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

56. “I found my way into the Met one afternoon in early September. I guess I wanted to see what other people had done with their lives, people who had made art alone, who had stared long and hard at bowls of fruit.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

57. “Occasionally, over the years, when I’d felt abandoned and scared and heard a voice in my mind say, “I want my mommy,” 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

58. “I counted the seconds passing. Time could go on forever like this, I thought again. Time would. Infinity loomed consistently and all at once, forever, with or without me. Amen.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

59. “You can see wealth in people no matter what they’re wearing. It’s in the cut of their chins, a certain gloss to the skin, a drag and pause to their responsiveness. When poor people hear a loud noise, they whip their heads around. Wealthy people finish their sentences, then just glance back.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

60. “I hoped they saw right through my death mask to my sad and fiery soul, though I doubt they saw me at all.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

61. “Life was repetitive, resonated at a low hum.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

62. “There is nobody watching you when you’re alone. You decide for yourself what’s right and wrong. There are no prizes for good little girls. If you want something, fight for it. Don’t be a fool.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

63. “Anyway, I don’t trust those people who poke around sad people’s minds and tell them how interesting it all is up there. It’s not interesting.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

64. “The speed of time varied, fast or slow, depending on the depth of my sleep. My favorite days were the ones that barely registered.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

65. “I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it’s her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I’ll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

66. “Thus, I lived in perpetual fantasy. And like all intelligent young women, I hid my shameful perversions under a facade of prudishness. Of course I did. It’s easy to tell the dirtiest minds-look for the cleanest fingernails.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

67. “He loved not the Christ but himself and the thrill of keeping people in line. He liked wearing his habit, and he liked the preposterous authority that his position granted him. Since his assignment in Lapvona, he had not given any real sermons. He simply translated Villiam’s rule into language that sounded vaguely religious.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

68. “A grown woman is like a coyote – she can get by on very little.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

69. “I still couldn’t accept that Trevor was a loser and a moron. I didn’t want to believe that I could have degraded myself for someone who didn’t deserve it. I was still stuck on that bit of vanity. But I was determined to sleep it away.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

70. “I learned the long way about love, tried every house on the block before I got it right. Now, finally, I love alone.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

71. “All I had to offer were my skills as a doormat, a blank wall, someone desperate enough to do anything – just short of murder, let’s say – simply to get someone to like me, let alone love me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

72. “Let them all go bald and burn in hell.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

73. “I looked so boring, lifeless, immune and unaffected, but in truth I was always furious, seething, my thoughts racing, my mind like a killer’s. It was easy to hide behind the dull face I wore, moping around. I really thought I had everybody fooled. And I didn’t really read books about flowers or home economics. I liked books about awful things – murder, illness, death.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

74. “I’ve just been certified as a shaman, or sha-woman, if you please,” Dr. Tuttle said.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

75. “She was an expert at conflating canned advice with any excuse for drinking to oblivion.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

76. “The ocean beyond like a canyon of woe, tumbling and icy all day and night, was so thunderous, I pictured God himself emerging from the water, laughing at us all in spite.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

77. “I was a shoplifter, a pervert, you might say, and a liar, of course, but nobody knew that. I would enforce the rules all the more, for didn’t that prove that I lived by a high moral code?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

78. “Furthermore, as is typical for any isolated, intelligent young person, I thought I was the only one with any consciousness, any awareness of how odd it was to be alive, to be a creature on this strange planet Earth.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

79. “Having a trash chute was one of my favorite things about my building. It made me feel important, like I was participating in the world. My trash mixed with the trash of others. The things I touched touched things other people had touched. I was contributing. I was connecting.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

80. “This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was the dream.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

81. “I had no big plan to become a curator, no great scheme to work my way up a ladder. I was just trying to pass the time. I thought if I did normal things – held down a job, for example – I could starve off the part of me that hated everything.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

82. “Sometimes I feel dead,” I told her, “and I hate everybody.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

83. “The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn’t exist yet. I was making it, standing there, breathing, fixing the air around my body with stillness, trying to capture something – a thought, I guess – as though such a thing were possible, as though I believed in the delusion described in those paintings – that time could be contained, held captive.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

84. “I went home and went to sleep. Outside of the occasional irritation, I had no nightmares, no passions, no desires, no great pains.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

85. “I took a Polaroid of her one night and stuck it into the frame of the mirror in the living room. Reva thought it was a loving gesture, but the photo was really meant as a reminder of how little I enjoyed her company if I felt like calling her later while I was under the influence.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

86. “I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

87. “How’d you do?” I remember the shopgirl asked, as though I may have done well or poorly. Why was my performance always called into question? Of course the dress looked awful on me. The shopgirl must have predicted that. But why was it I who had failed, and not the dress? “How did the dress do?” Is what she should have asked instead.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

88. “Her loyalty was absurd. This was what kept us going.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

89. “Soon, I’d be home again. Soon, God willing, I’d be asleep.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

90. “Things were alive. Life buzzed between each shade of green, from dark pines and supple ferns to lime green moss growing on a huge, dry gray rock. Honey locusts and ginkgos aflare in yellows. What was cowardly about the color yellow? Nothing.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

91. “I dreamt that I dragged both my parents’ dead bodies down into a ravine, then waited calmly in the moonlight, watching for vultures.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

92. “I miss you,” she said, her voice cracking a little. Maybe she thought those words would break through to my heart. I’d been taking Nembutals all day.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

93. “That’s fair,” I said, though my feelings were already hurt.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

94. “Walter and I had shared a mind, of course. Couples get that way. I think it has something to do with sharing a bed. The mind, untethered during sleep, travels up and away, dancing, sometimes in partners. Things pass back and forth in dreams.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

95. “When poor people hear a loud noise, they whip their heads around. Wealthy people finish their sentences, then just glance back.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

96. “What next? I couldn’t imagine.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

97. “We probably shouldn’t be friends,” I told her, stretching out on the sofa. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I see no reason to continue.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

98. “You remind me of a Dutch painting,” she said, staring into my eyes. “You have a strange face. Uncommon. Plain, but fascinating. It has a beautiful turbulence hidden in it. I love it. I bet you have brilliant dreams. I bet you dream of other worlds.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

99. “I touched the frame of the painting. And then I placed my whole palm on the dry, rumbling surface of the canvas, simply to prove to myself that there was no god stalking my soul. Time was not immemorial. Things were just things.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

100. “They were all so jovial and relaxed with one another, fraternal even. Maybe I was envious of that. They had lives – that was evident.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh