Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

204. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

217. “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

218. “It’s a lonely life.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

219. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

221. “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

222. “I am interested in disgust.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

227. “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.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

234. “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

235. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

240. “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

241. “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

242. “Nothing made me happy.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

243. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

245. “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

246. “Marek guessed that Villiam could use his wealth to influence God’s will. That was the way things worked, Marek thought. If you didn’t have money, you had to be good.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

248. “I wasn’t worth the calories.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

250. “I was the vacant, repressed depressive, and she was the obsessive blabbermouth, always knocking on my door, asking random questions, looking for any excuse to talk. I spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling that year, trying to cancel out thoughts about death with thoughts about nothingness.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh