Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Once I started sleeping full time, I didn’t look out my windows very often. A glimpse was all I ever wanted. The sun rose in the east and set in the west. That hadn’t changed, and it never would.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “I can imagine myself saying at the time that life itself was like a book borrowed from the library – something that did not belong to me and was due to expire. How silly.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

108. “People would be so much more at ease if they acted on impulse rather than reason. That’s why drugs are so effective in curing mental illness – because they impair our judgment. Don’t try to think too much.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

109. “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

110. “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

111. “What next? I couldn’t imagine.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “I’m at the end of my rope.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

116. “On a good day, every small thing is enchanting. Everything is a miracle. There is no emptiness. There is no need for forgiveness or escape or medicine. I hear only the wind in the trees, and my devils hatching their sacral plans, fusing all the shattered pieces together into a blanket of ice. I have found that it’s under that ice that I can feel I am just another normal person. In the dark and cold, I am at ’peace.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

117. “I needed a way out of this – the bathroom, the pills, the sleeplessness, the failed, stupid life.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

118. “I know I don’t have any real wisdom. I don’t have any wonderful ideas. I am lucky to have found a few nice people here and there.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

119. “Violence was just another function of the body, no less unusual than sweating or vomiting. It sat on the same shelf as sexual intercourse. The two got mixed up quite often, it seemed. For.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

120. “Love can be like that. It can vanish in an instant. It’s happened since, too. A lover has left the warm rapture of my bed to get a glass of water and returned only to find me cold, uninterested, empty, a stranger. Love can reappear, too, but never again unscathed. The second round is inevitably accompanied by doubt, intention, self-disgust. But that is neither here nor there.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

121. “Trevor got out of the car to hose me off in the garden, made me strip and put on his blazer before getting back into the car, then asked for a blow job in the parking lot of the Poughkeepsie Galleria before he went in to buy me a new outfit. I acquiesced. For him, this was erotic gold.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

122. “Every few weeks, she had a whole new paradigm for living, and I had to hear about it.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

123. “But these painters of fruit thought only of their own mortality, as though the beauty of their work would somehow soothe their fear of death. There they all were, hanging feckless and candid and meaningless, paintings of things, objects, the paintings themselves just things, objects, withering toward their own inevitable demise.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

124. “You can always tell something when a woman is overdressed – either she’s an outsider, or she’s insane.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

125. “The first time I met Dr. Tuttle, she wore a foam neck brace because of a “taxi accident” and was holding an obese tabby, whom she introduced as “my eldest.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

126. “There’s nothing I detest more than men with happy childhoods.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

127. “I kept my head down, away from the biting air and the joy of the holiday. I didn’t want to be reminded of Christmases past. No associations, no heartstrings snagged on a tree in a window, no memories.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

128. “I trusted that everything was going to work out fine as long as I could sleep all day.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

129. “I always called back to cancel, which I hated doing because I hated talking to people.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

130. “Every time I saw Lacey, she’d gained five more pounds. She was turning into the kind of obese girl who does her hair like a forties pinup and wears bright red lipstick, a blue polka-dot dress with a white doily collar, colorful tattoos across her huge, smushed cleavage, as if these considerations would distract us from how fat and miserable she’d become.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

131. “I was nervous. It had been a long time since I’d gone any place I wanted to be.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

132. “My favorite days were the ones that barely registered. I’d catch myself not breathing, slumped on the sofa, staring at an eddy of dust tumbling across the hardwood floor in the draft, and I’d remember that I was alive for a second, then fade back out.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

133. “Family time can put a strain on the mentally deranged.” She clucked her tongue as though out of pity.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

134. “That is what I imagined life to be – one long sentence of waiting out the clock.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

135. “I tell him I wish I could stay with him, but not here, not on Earth. Earth is the wrong place for me, always was and will be until the day I die.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

136. “I didn’t believe in heaven, but I did believe in hell.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

137. “Carnage or contribution. That’s what priests always say.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

138. “He and I agreed that people looked stupid when they were “having a good time.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

139. “If I had been a man, I may have turned to a life of crime. But I looked like an off-duty model. It was too easy to let things come easy and go nowhere.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

140. “I rarely interacted much with anyone back then who wasn’t retarded. When I did, it struck me how pompous and impatient they were, always measuring their words, twisting things around. Everybody was so obsessed with being understood. It made me sick.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

141. “There was a fine mathematics for how to mete out sedation. The goal for most days was to get to a point where I could drift off easily, and come to without being startled. My thoughts were banal. My pulse was casual. Only the coffee made my heart work a bit harder. Caffeine was my exercise.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

142. “Someone once said that when you die of hypothermia, you get cold and sleepy, things slow down, and then you just drift away. You don’t feel a thing. That sounded nice. That was the best way to die – awake and dreaming, feeling nothing.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

143. “People died all the time. Why couldn’t I?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

144. “If, when I woke up in June, life still wasn’t worth the trouble, I would end it. I would jump. This was the deal I made.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

145. “But I never did try very hard to please my mother. In fact, I never tried hard to please anybody at all after that day in the locked room. Now I only try hard to please myself. That is all that matters here. That is the secret thing I found.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

146. “I’ve lived with many alcoholic men over the years, and each has taught me that it is useless to worry, fruitless to ask why, suicide to try to help them. They are who they are for better and worse.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

147. “He thought that the drugs we bought in the bus-depot restroom were intended to expand his mind, as though some door could be unlocked up there and he would greet his own genius – some glowing alien in glasses and sneakers, spinning planet Earth on its finger. Clark was an idiot.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

148. “I hated my boyfriend but I liked the neighborhood.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

149. “I wasn’t an insomniac, but I was miserable.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

150. “Right,” I said, but it didn’t feel very right. I didn’t want to make it. I wanted to lie down with it and strangle it and kill it and save it and nurse it and kill it again and I wanted to go and forget where I was going and I wanted to change my name and forget my face and I wanted to drink and get my head ruined but I certainly hadn’t thought about making it. That wasn’t anything I’d ever sought out to do.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh