Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Sometimes I woke up with my face wet with tears.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

252. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

254. “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

255. “Nothing made me happy.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

268. “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

269. “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

270. “She had indeed seen death and she was not afraid of it. What scared her were other people and their immovable selfishness.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

271. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

276. “Children are selfish, she thought. They rob you of life. They thrive as you toil and wither, and then they bury you, their tears never once falling out of regret for what they’ve stolen. That.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

277. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

281. “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

282. “Then, on a Sunday morning, my father was suddenly lucid and told me matter-of-factly that he would die in the afternoon.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

283. “I felt nothing. I could think of feelings, emotions, but I couldn’t bring them up in me. I couldn’t even locate where my emotions came from. My brain?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

284. “Oprah says that we women rush into decisions because we don’t have faith that something better will ever come along. And that’s how we get stuck in dissatisfying careers and marriages. Amen!”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

285. “The best was when I could see the hard face of a cold-hearted killer breaking through the chubby cheeks and callow softness of youth.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

286. “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

287. “The heart is a moody, greedy thing, I suppose.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

288. “I see your game. You’ve trying to shame me for being young and pretty. You want to make me apologize for all the other girls who didn’t like you. You just can’t stand that I’m right next door reminding you of all that. That’s it, isn’t it? Pump and dump,” she scoffed. “Nothing you say can hurt me. See if you can do it. I dare you.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

289. “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

290. “Vuna and Jon were not free. Their idea of life was to work the land and worship, and to have another child who could work the land and worship when they were gone. Their only anxiety was in what the land would produce for them. Didn’t they know that the land was God itself, the sun and moon and rain, that it was all God? The life in their seeds of wheat, the manure from the cow, that was God. The priest had nothing to do with it.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

291. “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

292. “I couldn’t even locate where my emotions came from. My brain? It made no sense. Irritation was what I knew best – a heaviness on my chest, a vibration in my neck like my head was revving up before it would rocket off my body.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

293. “I thought she seemed smug; she sighed as she ran each stapled bag under the scanner, as though it exhausted her to deal with me and all my mental health issues.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

294. “My mom is in this cheap little wooden box now,” she whined. “It’s only this big.” She took her hands off the wheel to show me the dimensions, voguing.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

295. “Your problem is that you’re passive. You wait around for things to change, and they never will.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

296. “Things were happening in New York City – they always are – but none of it affected me. This was the beauty of sleep – reality detached itself and appeared in my mind as casually as a movie or a dream. It was easy to ignore things that didn’t concern me. Subway workers went on strike. A hurricane came and went. It didn’t matter. Extraterrestrials could have invaded, locusts could have swarmed, and I would have noted it, but I wouldn’t have worried.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

297. “I loved it, or at least I thought I ought to love it – I’ve never been very clear on that distinction.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

298. “I’d been up on bad cocaine and drinking for days. I’d roped a few man back to my apartment and showed them all my belongings, stretched out flesh-colored tights and proposed we take turns hanging each other. Nobody last more than a few hours.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

299. “Una notte la fotografai con la Polaroid e infilai la foto nella cornice dello specchio in soggiorno. Reva pensava fosse un gesto amorevole, ma la foto per me era un memento di quanto poco mi divertiva la sua compagnia se mi veniva voglia di chiamarla quando ero sotto l’effetto di farmaci.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh