Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “It’s the map of my childhood, my sadness, my Eden, my hell and home.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

202. “Jude didn’t understand forgiveness. He was incapable of forgiveness because he was so addled by his own grief and grudges. This bad blood was what kept Jude’s heart pumping.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

203. “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

204. “We’re mostly empty space. We’re mostly nothing. Tra-la-la. And we’re all the same nothingness. You and me, just filling the space with nothingness.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

205. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

207. “When she asked the birds what to do, they answered that they didn’t know anything about love, that love was a distinctly human defect which God had created to counterbalance the power of human greed.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

208. “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

209. “Oxytocin is a hormone released during copulation,” my father went on, staring at the blank wall behind me. “Orgasm,” my mother whispered. “Biologically, oxytocin serves a purpose,” my father said. “That warm fuzzy feeling.” “It’s what bonds a couple together. Without it, the human species would have gone extinct a long time ago. Women experience its effects more powerfully than men do. It’s good to be aware of that.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

210. “I plunged into sleep full force once this arrangement had been made. It was an exciting time in my life. I felt hopeful. I felt I was on my way to a great transformation.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

211. “But as a young woman in X-ville, I had no idea that other people – men or women – felt things as deeply as I did.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

212. “Mind over matter, people say, But what is matter, anyway?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

213. “He went outside, desperate for something, anything – an embrace or a blow to the head.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

215. “They’re mostly pleasant visions, ethereal spirits, celestial light patterns, angels, friendly ghosts. Sprites. Nymphs. Glitter. Hallucinating is completely harmless. And it happens mostly to Asians. What, may I ask, is your ethnic background?” “English, French, Swedish, German.” “You’ll be fine.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

217. “Truth be told, I was a glutton for punishment.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

218. “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

219. “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

220. “I closed my eyes. I could go anywhere with my eyes closed to the moon if I wanted, listen to the deafening echo of silence as it spun through space. That is the sound of silence, isn’t it? The sound of death? The sound of nonexistence? The friction of not being? Everyone on Earth had heard of death, from time to time. How many have fallen there! Others had lived and died before me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

221. “She looked like Lee Miller if Lee Miller had been a bedroom drunk.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

222. “Did you bring your book of nightmares?” Dr. Tuttle asked, sitting down behind her desk.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

224. “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

225. “My family isn’t religious or anything. They just like to sit around and eat a lot. My aunts and uncles drove in from New Jersey.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

226. “I was plagued with misery, anxiety, a wish to escape the prison of my mind and body.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

227. “Nothing made me happy.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

228. “They lamented the success of others. They thought that they wanted to be adored, to be influential, celebrated for their genius, that they deserved to be worshipped. But they could barely look at themselves in the mirror. They were all on Klonopin, was my guess.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

230. “Men don’t feel bad the way you want them to,” I told her. “They just get grouchy and depressed when they can’t have what they want. That’s why you got fired. You’re depressing. Consider it a compliment, if you want.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

231. “Sometimes I feel dead,” I told her, “and I hate everybody. Does that count?” “Oh, that counts. That certainly counts.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

232. “I’m like a beautiful tortoise. I don’t waste my energy. Life is precious to me now.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

233. “I thought that if I did normal things – held down a job, for example – I could starve off the part of me that hated everything.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

234. “Pain is not the only touchstone for growth.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

235. “Soon we’ll be old and ugly. Life is short, you know? Die young and leave a beautiful corpse.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

236. “When I came out of the cave, back out into the light, when I woke up at last, everything -the whole world-would be new again.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

237. “I lost track of time in this way. Days passed. Weeks. A few months went by.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

238. “It was exciting to feel so much spite for somebody. It inspired me; I almost felt like dancing. If I was an artist, I thought, I would paint a huge black-and-red canvas, stabbing with my brush in a frenzy until I fell down on the floor in a heap, sweating and dizzy, the world spinning above me. I wished I could be breathless like that, and for so long I’d believed I couldn’t.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

240. “At that moment, I felt happy. Meeting Rebecca was like learning to dance, discovering jazz. It was like falling in love for the first time. I had always been waiting for my future to erupt around me in an avalanche of glory, and now I felt it was really happening. Rebecca was all it took. Per aspera ad astra.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

242. “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

243. “I am interested in disgust.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

244. “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

245. “I let her do whatever she wanted to do to me that day in the cabin. It wasn’t painful, nor was it terrifying, but it was disgusting – just as I’d always hoped it to be.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

246. “Love me and I’ll turn a blind eye to your faults.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

247. “You can see wealth in people no matter what they’re wearing. It’s in the cut of their chins, a certain gloss to the skin, a drag and pause to their responsiveness.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

248. “In that moment, I think our friendship ended. What would come later would be only airy remembrances of the thing called love she used to give me. I felt a kind of peace about Reva seeing her off that day.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

250. “There was no need for reassurance or directionality because I was nowhere, doing nothing. I was nothing. I was gone.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh