Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “If you want something and can’t have it, want something else. Want what you deserve. You’ll probably get it.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

52. “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

53. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

55. “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

56. “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

57. “Only the coffee made my heart work a bit harder. Caffeine was my exercise.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

58. “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

59. “I had a thing about fat people. It was the same thing I had about skinny people: I hated their guts.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

65. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

75. “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

76. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

78. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

87. “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

88. “What next? I couldn’t imagine.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

89. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

91. “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

92. “In the distance, people were living lives, having fun, learning, making money, fighting and walking around and falling in and out of love. People were being born, growing up, dropping dead. Trevor was probably spending his Christmas vacation with some woman in Hawaii or Bali or Tulum. He was probably fingering her at that very moment, telling her he loved her. He might actually be happy. I shut the window and lowered all the blinds.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

93. “He never knew what to say around her. Everything he wanted to say was ‘You are beautiful’ and ‘I’m in love with you.’ There was, in his mind, nothing else for him to say.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

94. “Every three days, I’d wake up, look at 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 fourth hours in a conscious state.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

95. “The second hand on the clock shook and bolted forward like someone at first terrified with anxiety, then, bolstered by desperation, jumping off a cliff only to get stuck in midair.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

96. “Mirth,” Dr. Tuttle said. “I like it better than joy. Happiness isn’t a word I like to use in here. It’s very arresting, happiness.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

98. “I didn’t like dogs. Not because they scared me – they didn’t – but because their deaths were so much harder to take than people’s.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

99. “There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

100. “And anyway, there is no comfort here on Earth. There is pretending, there are words, but there is no peace. Nothing is good here. Nothing. Every place you go on Earth, there is more nonsense.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh