Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Love me and I’ll turn a blind eye to your faults.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

252. “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

253. “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

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

— 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. “My hibernation was self-preservational.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

260. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

269. “I thought that if I did normal things – held down a job, for example – I could starve off the part of me that hated everything.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

271. “They’re mostly pleasant visions, ethereal spirits, celestial light patterns, angels, friendly ghosts. Sprites. Nymphs. Glitter. Hallucinating is completely harmless. And it happens mostly to Asians. What, may I ask, is your ethnic background?” “English, French, Swedish, German.” “You’ll be fine.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

292. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

294. “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

295. “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

296. “Good strong American sleep.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

297. “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

298. “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

299. “Each night, he’d plop an Alka-Seltzer tablet in a glass of water. I stood by as it dissolved. I remember listening to the fizzing sound as he silently removed the cushions from the sofa and stacked them in the corner, his sad colorless pajamas dragging across the floor. Maybe that’s when his cancer started, a few odd cells forming during a bad night’s sleep in the living room.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

300. “There was no work to do, nothing I had to counteract or compensate for because there was nothing at all, period. And yet I was aware of the nothingness. I was awake in the sleep, somehow. I felt good. Almost happy.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh