Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “I even made myself a cup of chamomile tea, the nauseating sweet smell wafting up from my chipped coffee cup like a hot diaper. This was supposed to be relaxing?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

113. “I just wanted to sleep all the time. I had a plan.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

128. “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

129. “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

130. “Beauty is the Devil’s shade,’ Jude said.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

131. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

134. “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

135. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

137. “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

138. “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

139. “I think by then I’d been single longer than is healthy for a young man.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

140. “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

141. “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

142. “I had the vague notion that bearing arms was in poor taste. Unless you were terribly wealthy, hunting was for the brutish lower class, uncivilized country folk, primitive types, people who were dumb and callous and ugly. 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.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

143. “I had hard feelings around the holidays, the one time of year I couldn’t help but fall prey to the canned self-pity Christmas prescribes.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

145. “I’m at the end of my rope.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

146. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

149. “And yet I was aware of the nothingness. I was awake in the sleep, somehow. I felt good. Almost happy.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh