Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Did you bring your book of nightmares?” Dr. Tuttle asked, sitting down behind her desk.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

252. “I wasn’t worth the calories.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

254. “I loved her the way I loved the little seedlings soon to sprout in my new garden. I loved her the way I loved life, the miracle of growth and things blossoming.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

256. “Good strong American sleep.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

260. “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

261. “My hibernation was self-preservational.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

262. “Nothing made me happy.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

263. “Knowledge of anything current or faddish made me feel I was just a victim of isolation.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

265. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

267. “This was Yorkville, the Upper East Side. People were uptight. When I shuffled through the lobby in my pajamas and slippers on my way to the bodega, I felt like I was committing a crime, but I didn’t care.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

268. “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

269. “Villiam was asleep in his four-post bed. He dreamt that the bed was made of human flesh, a living thing of fat and soft baby skin.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

270. “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

271. “At work, I took hour-long naps in the supply closet under the stairs during my lunch breaks.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

272. “I never fell asleep when I didn’t want to. I was more of a somniac. A somnophile. I’d always loved sleeping. It was one thing my mother and I had enjoyed doing together when I was a child. She was not the type to sit and watch me draw or read me books or play games or go for walks in the park or bake brownies. We got along best when we were asleep.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

276. “She packed everything into the shopping bags with the urgent efficiency of someone building a sand castle at sundown, as the tide comes in. Like a dream you know will end. If I move fast enough, I won’t wake the gods.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

277. “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

278. “I knew what I’d said just wasn’t true. But I was young enough, and had been enslaved enough by my public school education and my father and his Catholicism, and was frightened enough of being punished or questioned or singled out, that I obeyed every rule there was at Moorehead.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

279. “Isn’t it only fair that I should get to choose how I’ll die? I wouldn’t die like my father did, passive and quiet while the cancer ate him alive. At least my mother did things her own way. I’d never thought to admire her before for that. At least she had guts. At least she took matters into her own hands.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

280. “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

281. “Yes, yes, be alive, make your mess, but when you die, leave not a trace. Sweep up any evidence of your existence. Reminders will only trouble those who live on. They’ll have to waste their own lives cleaning up yours.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

282. “The pharmacist on duty that evening was a young Latina woman – perfect eyebrows, fake nails. She knew me on sight. “Give me ten minutes,” she said.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

283. “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

284. “She’d done everything so many times in her life, she drifted between now and then, often getting lost in between.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

285. “I wasn’t radical at all. I was simply unhappy.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

286. “She awoke in my heart some long-sleeping dragon.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

287. “In the moments waiting to lose consciousness, I imagined Trevor on one knee, proposing to his current lady friend. The self-satisfaction. The stupidity of wanting something “forever.” I almost felt sorry for him, for her.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

288. “I decided I would only pretend to believe in God since that seemed just as good as real faith, which I didn’t have.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

289. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

291. “I deplored silence. I deplored stillness. I hated almost everything. I was very unhappy and angry all the time. I tried to control myself, and that only made me more awkward, unhappier, and angrier. 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

292. “When I needed more pills, I ventured out to the Rite Aid three blocks away. That was always a painful passage. Walking up First Avenue, everything made me cringe. I was like a baby being born – the air hurt, the light hurt, the details of the world seemed garish and hostile.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

293. “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

294. “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

295. “I spent many hours watching his biceps flick and pump as he turned each page of his comic book. When I imagine him now, I think of the way he’d swerve a toothpick around in his mouth. It was beautiful. It was poetry. I asked him once, nervous and ridiculous, whether he felt cold wearing just short sleeves in winter. He shrugged. Still waters ran deep, I thought, nearly swooning.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

296. “The law was all set up to keep people convinced their fears were well-guided. They came up with ways to prove themselves right about people who seemed a little different.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

297. “But such was death – it had nothing to say.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

298. “Having never known love before, he couldn’t recognize the feeling. Something was terribly wrong, he felt.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

299. “Passai molto tempo a fissare il soffitto quell’anno, tentando di cancellare pensieri di morte con pensieri di nulla.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

300. “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.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh