Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I was plagued with misery, anxiety, a wish to escape the prison of my mind and body.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

203. “Christmas in Lapvona had a strange, ominous tilt to it that winter. The birth of the last Christ was so many hundreds of years ago, and there was some trepidation around celebrating while Villiam’s new wife was pregnant with the next one. This.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

206. “I watched summer die and autumn turn cold and gray through a broken slat in the blinds.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

207. “But coming out of that sleep was excruciating. My entire life flashed before my eyes in the worst way possible, my mind refilling itself with all my lame memories, every little thing that had brought me to where I was.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

208. “But she was right about me. I was “on drugs.” I took upwards of a dozen pills a day. But it was all very regulated, I thought. It was all totally aboveboard. I just wanted to sleep all the time. I had a plan. “I’m not a junkie or something,” I said defensively. “I’m taking some time off. This is my year of rest and relaxation.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

209. “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

210. “I was like Joan of Arc, or Hamlet, but born into the wrong life – the life of a nobody, a waif, invisible. There’s no better way to say it: I was not myself back then. I was someone else. I was Eileen.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

212. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “I am interested in disgust.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

220. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

222. “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

223. “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

224. “A house that is so well maintained, furnished with good-looking furniture of high quality, decorated tastefully, everything in its place, becomes a living tomb. People truly engaged in life have messy houses. I knew this implicitly at age twenty-four. Of course at twenty-four I was also obsessed with death.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

225. “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

226. “Looking at my reflection really did soothe me, though I hated my face with a passion. Such is the life of the self-obsessed.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

227. “I’m taking some time off. This is my year of rest and relaxation.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

228. “Charm is not a hairstyle. You either have it or you don’t. The more you try to be fashionable, the tackier you’ll look.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

229. “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

230. “Reva had an interesting method of mixing her drinks. After each sip of Diet Mountain Dew, she’d pour a little Jose Cuervo into the can to take up the space her sip had displaced, so that by the time she finished, she was drinking straight tequila.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

231. “Blood was the wine of the spirit, was it not?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

232. “Makeup made a girl look so desperate, I thought. People were so dishonest with their clothes and personalities.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

233. “I felt I’d walked into a scene from a movie in which someone was going mad, the air heavy with suspense.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

235. “Something struck me as I watched Randy scratch his elbow, then lean against the door frame of the visitation room – I was no longer in love with him. Looking at him with eyes now glazed over in my new affection for Rebecca, he seemed like a nobody, a face in a crowd, gray and meaningless like an old newspaper clipping of a story I’d read so many times, it no longer impressed me. Love can be like that. It can vanish in an instant.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

236. “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

237. “Nothing made me happy.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

238. “It’s a lonely life.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

239. “You must have a callus on your cortex,” Dr. Tuttle said, clucking her tongue. “Not figuratively. Not literally, I mean. I’m saying, parenthetically,” she held up her hands and cupped them side by side to demonstrate the punctuation. “You’ve built up a tolerance, but it doesn’t mean the drugs are failing.” “You’re probably right,” I replied. “Not probably.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

241. “I still couldn’t accept that Trevor was a loser and a moron. I didn’t want to believe that I could have degraded myself for someone who didn’t deserve it.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

242. “Being pretty only kept me trapped in a world that valued looks above all else.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

243. “Sometimes I woke up with my face wet with tears.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

244. “Not that what I was doing was suicide. In fact, it was the opposite of suicide. My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

246. “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

247. “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

248. “I got antsy, thinking about my past.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

249. “Studied grace is not grace,” I once.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh