Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 5 of 10

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

206. “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

207. “It’s a lonely life.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

208. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

212. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

214. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

219. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

222. “I am interested in disgust.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

224. “She was a strong girl, but she carried death with her. Death is like that. Like a beggar that follows you down the road. And kills you.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

225. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

227. “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

228. “A little lying never hurt anybody. It kept the bounds of what one person was distinct from what another person was.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

235. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

237. “I wasn’t worth the calories.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

238. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

240. “I still felt like she was up to something down there, bitter and suffering as the flesh on her body withered and sank away from her bones. Did she blame me? We buried her in a carnation pink Thierry Mugler suit. Her hair was perfect. Her lipstick was perfect, blood red, Christian Dior 999. If I unearthed her now, would the lipstick have faded? Either way, she’d be a stiff husk, like the sloughed-off exoskeleton of a huge insect. That was what my mother was.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

241. “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

242. “Similarly, I did not like to dance or do sports. I did not listen to the Beatles or watch Ed Sullivan on TV. I wasn’t interested in fun or popularity back then. I preferred to read about ancient times, distant lands. Knowledge of anything current or faddish made me feel I was just a victim of isolation. If I avoided all that on purpose, I could believe I was in control.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

243. “Good strong American sleep.”

— 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 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. “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

247. “The worst crime I could commit in his eyes was to do anything for my own pleasure, anything outside of my daughterly duties.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

248. “My hibernation was self-preservational.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

249. “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

250. “What if the only way to sleep is death?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh