Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “I was trapped. The day would be hell. I would suffer. I felt I might not survive. I needed a dark, quiet room, my videos, my bed, my pills. I hadn’t been this far from home in many months. I was frightened.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

153. “I wasn’t entirely awake, but I couldn’t cross the line into sleep. ‘Go. Go on. The abyss is right there. Just a few more steps.’ But I was too tired to break through the glass.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

154. “Sometimes I felt that my mind was just a soft cloud of air around me, taking in whatever flew in, spinning it around, and then delivering it back out into the ether.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

155. “I could feel the certainty of a reality leeching out of me like calcium from a bone. I was starving my mind into obliqueness. I felt less and less. Words came and I spoke them in my head, then nestled in on the sound of them, got lost in the music.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

156. “It was already getting dark out, but I kept my sunglasses on. I didn’t want to have to look anybody in the eye. I didn’t want to relate to anybody too keenly. Plus, the fluorescent lights at the drug store were blinding. If I could have purchased my medications from a vending machine, I would have paid double for them.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

157. “He liked to buy his vegetables at a discount, too, usually off the sale rack in the supermarket. He’d been doing it for so long that the very sight of that neon orange discount sticker could make his mouth water. He.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

158. “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

159. “He was dispassionate, sulky, even a little snide at times. I took after him. My mother did say once we were both “stone wolves.” But she herself had a cold aura, too. I don’t think she realized it. None of us had much warmth in our hearts. I was never allowed to have any pets. Sometimes I think a puppy might have changed everything.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

160. “I lay awake for a long time. It was like sitting in a cinema after the lights go down, waiting for the previews to begin. But nothing was happening. I regretted the coffee.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

161. “It also concerned me that my demise would have no great impact, that I could blow my head off and people would say, “That’s all right. Let’s get something to eat.” That.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

162. “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

163. “Whoever had written the note understood that be masking one’s peculiarities, one invokes authority.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

164. “How did people go on with their lives as though death weren’t all around them?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

165. “It’s remarkable what people become blind to when they’re in such darkness.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

166. “And unless you’ve grown up in New England, you don’t know the peculiar stillness of a coastal town covered in snow at night. It is not like in other places. The light does something funny at sunset. It seems not to wane but to recede out toward the ocean. The light just gets pulled away. I’ll.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

167. “It’s not that I lacked respect for the people of Alna. I simply didn’t want to deal with them. I was tired. During the school year, all I did was contend with stupidity and ignorance. That’s what teachers are paid to do. How I got stuck teaching Dickens to fourteen-year-olds is a mystery to me. 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.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

169. “Natasha’s star artist was Ping Xi, a pubescent-looking twenty-three-year-old from Diamond Bar, California. She thought he was a good investment because he was Asian American and had been kicked out of CalArts for firing a gun in his studio. He would add a certain cachet. “I want the gallery to get more cerebral,” she explained. “The market is moving away from emotion. Now it’s all about process and ideas and branding. Masculinity is hot right now.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

170. “I’d never learned how to relate to people, much less how to speak up for myself. I preferred to sit and rage quietly.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

171. “She’d realize that we had no good reason to be friends, and that she would never get what she needed from me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

172. “What about heaven, Ina? Don’t you want to go?’ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I won’t know anyone.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

173. “It was comforting to have an animal, so consistently near and needy, to focus on, to nurture. Just to have another heart beating in the room, a live energy, had cheered me. I hadn’t realized how lonely I’d been, and then suddenly I wasn’t alone at all. I had a dog. Never again would I be alone, I thought. What a gift to have such a companion, like a child and protector, both, something wiser than me in so many ways, and yet doting, loyal, and affectionate.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

175. “It’s the map of my childhood, my sadness, my Eden, my hell and home.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

176. “Jacques-Louis David: Art, Virtue, and Revolution.” The Death of Marat was one of my favorite paintings. A man stabbed to death in the bathtub.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

177. “He was very intelligent and preoccupied with death and suffering.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

178. “Cutouts from fashion magazines were taped to the edges of the mirror over the low vanity and sink: Claudia Schiffer’s Guess Jeans ad. Kate Moss in her Calvins. Runway stick figures. Linda Evangelista. Kate Moss. Kate Moss. Kate Moss.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

179. “I remember watching her “put her face on,” as she called it, and wondering if one day I’d be like her, a beautiful fish in a man-made pool, circling and circling, surviving the tedium only because my memory can contain only what is imprinted on the last few minutes of my life, constantly forgetting my thoughts.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

180. “My little world of exhaust and vomit was somehow wonderful.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

181. “It’s either this or that. Decide and move forward. You spend so much time playing in your mind, like a sandbox. Everything just slipping through your fingers, nothing solid to hold.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

182. “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

183. “I watched that old world go by, away and away, gone gone gone, until, like me, it disappeared.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

184. “My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

185. “Did they know that glory was mundane?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

186. “I still felt that the good things, the things I wanted, belonged to somebody else.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

187. “I’d been stupid to believe that employment would add value to my life.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

189. “We all have our own ways to cope with stress,” she said, and rambled on about the benefits of habitual behaviors. “Self-soothing,” is how she described it. “Like meditation.” I yawned, hating her.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

190. “If he could have it his way, nobody would ever say anything again. The entire world would go silent. Even the clocks wouldn’t tick. All that mattered would be the beating of hearts, the widening and narrowing of pupils, the whirling of ties and loose strands of hair in the wind – nothing voluntary, nothing false.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

191. “It’s funny how love can leap from one person to another, like a flea.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

192. “His jaw was narrow and angular, his chin a lame afterthought. His skin was evenly toned and well moisturized, smoother than mine even. He barely had to shave. He always smelled like a department store. If I’d met him now, I would have assumed that he was gay.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

193. “Me alejaba de cualquier cosa que pudiera despertarme el intelecto o darme envidia o ansiedad.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

194. “I flipped it over: Ping Xi’s business card with his name, number, e-mail address, and the corniest quotation I’d ever read: “Every act of creation is an act of destruction. – Pablo Picasso.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

195. “His heart growled like a trapped animal, brooding and useless.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

196. “The slightest thing delighted him. I wished I could be more like that, and tried to promise myself I’d work harder to be happier.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

197. “Since he was little, a scraped knee or a whipped back, anything to make his body hurt, felt like the hand of God upon him.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

198. “When God gives you more than you can tolerate, you turn to instinct. And instinct is a force beyond anyone’s control.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

199. “I might have felt better if he were dead, I thought, since behind every memory of him was the possibility of reconciling, and thus more heartbreak and indignity. I felt weak.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

200. “I’m at the end of my rope.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh