Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “I searched for something in his face, anything his mask of contentment might betray, but there was nothing. He was a genius in that sense-a master. His was the best mask I’d ever seen.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

253. “When I stole things I felt I was invincible, as though I had punished the world and rewarded myself, setting things right for once – justice served. I.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

254. “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

255. “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

256. “The ‘side effects and warnings’ on the Internet were discouraging, and anxieties over them amplified the volume of my thoughts, which was the exact opposite of what I hoped the pills would do.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

257. “Through the thorns to the stars.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

258. “You can see wealth in people no matter what they’re wearing. It’s in the cut of their chins, a certain gloss to the skin, a drag and pause to their responsiveness.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

259. “I can’t blame Dr. Tuttle for her terrible advice. I elected to be her patient, after all.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

260. “Why is it, Waldemar,” I would ask him, “that whenever something here is so beautiful, I just want to die?” “Because it reminds you of the other place,” Waldemar would say to me. “The most beautiful place of all.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

262. “I rebelled in silent ways, with my thoughts.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

263. “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

264. “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

265. “It was all nonsense, but people loved it.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

267. “He was like that – regretful and arrogant and illogical at once. I don’t think he ever really loved his children. The wedding band he continued to wear years after her death suggested that he’d loved our mother to some degrees at least. But I suspect he was incapable of love, real love. He was a cruel character. Imagining his parents beating him as a child is the only path to forgiveness that I have found so far. It isn’t perfect, but it does the trick.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

268. “Having to breathe was an embarrassment in itself. This was the kind of girl I was. Besides.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

269. “I steered clear of anything that might pique my intellect or make me envious or anxious. I kept my head down.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

270. “I’d never been jealous of any young woman’s looks. For me, it was like seeing a cute little squirrel. This one has big eyes, that one has a charming stripe, et cetera. But some women really take offense at youth and beauty.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

272. “I just can’t stand it. I’d rather kill myself than be all alone,” she said. “At least you have options.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

278. “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

279. “Growing up, I learned I’d be praised and rewarded for my suffering, for my strong efforts to be good, but every year God smote.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

280. “I just wanted some downers to drown out my thoughts and judgments, since the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

282. “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

283. “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

284. “In Artforum, Ronald Jones had called me a “bloated nymph with dead man eyes.” Phyllis Braff had condemned the show as “a product of Oedipal lust” in the New York Times.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

285. “Perhaps God liked her best, she thought, because she asked for so little.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

286. “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

287. “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

288. “Having to breathe was an embarrassment in itself.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

289. “The tonality of my night sleep was more variable, generally unpredictable, but every time I lay down in that supply closet I went straight into black emptiness, an infinite space of nothingness. I was neither scared nor elated in that space. I had no visions. I had no ideas. If I had a distinct thought, I would hear it, and the sound of it would echo and echo until it got absorbed by the darkness and disappeared.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

290. “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

291. “I wasn’t worth the calories.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

292. “So I was good. I did all the right things. I rebelled in silent ways, with my thoughts.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

293. “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

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. “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

296. “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

297. “FOR A YEAR OR SO, everything seemed fine with Natasha. The most grief she gave me was about ordering the wrong pens. “Why do we have all these cheap clicky pens? They’re so loud when you click them. You can’t hear this?” She stood there, clicking at me. “Sorry, Natasha,” I said. “I’ll order quieter pens.” “Has FedEx come yet?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

298. “Life was persistent. There it was, every day. Each morning it woke me up. It was loud and brash. A bully. A lounge singer in a garish sequin dress. A runaway truck. A jackhammer. A brush fire. A canker sore. Death was different. It was tender, a mystery.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

299. “Good strong American sleep.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh