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. “Had Reva convinced me to go ‘enjoy myself’ or something just as idiotic?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

153. “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

154. “Tell me everything!” she’d cry, salivating. Poor Reva. She might actually have thought I was capable of sharing things. “Friends forever?” She’d want us to make some sacred pact. She always wanted to make pacts. “Let’s make a pact to have brunch at least twice a month. Let’s promise to go for a walk through Central Park every Saturday. Let’s have a daily call-time. Will you swear to take a ski trip this year? It burns so many calories.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

155. “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

156. “I felt happy. I hardly felt like myself.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

157. “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

158. “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

159. “I’ve heard a sip of gin will make you immune to mosquitoes and other pests.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

160. “When Joanie and I were little, our mother would send us to church with our father every Sunday. Joanie never seemed to protest, but she’d just sit there during the liturgy reading Nancy Drew, chewing gum. She refused to kneel and stand along with the rest of us and said, “Blah blah blah” instead of the “Our Father,” twirled her hair.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

161. “I can’t say what I was looking for exactly, though I was ever hopeful that he might come out and profess his love, save me, run away with me, solve all my problems.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

173. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

180. “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

181. “There was no right way to deal with grief, of course. When God gives you more than you can tolerate, you turn to instinct. And instinct is a force beyond anyone’s control.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

182. “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

183. “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

184. “She was, to him, a holy grace, far more powerful than any priest or nun. God lived in her eyes. That was how he had fallen for her – like a religious conversion. It had struck him the moment he’d seen her, a profound, eternal love, the kind that occurred by cause of fate, against reason.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

186. “This is my year of rest and relaxation.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

187. “I once asked her whether her jealousy had anything to do with her being Jewish, if she thought things came easier to me because I was a WASP.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

191. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

193. “I’d rather be alone than anybody’s live-in prostitute,” I said to Reva.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

195. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

197. “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

198. “I figured that if I jumped out while I was on the Infermiterol, it would be a painless death. A blackout death. I’d either wake up safe in the apartment, or I wouldn’t. It was a risk I’d take forty times, every three days. 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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

200. “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