Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 6 of 10

251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

256. “So you’re not sick?” “I’m resting.” I lay down on the sofa to demonstrate.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

258. “Sometimes I woke up with my face wet with tears.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

264. “I wasn’t worth the calories.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “Good strong American sleep.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

271. “Psychic diseases get passed around in confined spaces. I sense your mind is too porous.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

272. “I was like a baby being born – the air hurt, the light hurt, the details of the world seemed garish and hostile.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

273. “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

274. “My hibernation was self-preservational.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

277. “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

278. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

280. “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

281. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

283. “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

284. “They want good meat on your bones before they eat you alive.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

285. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

287. “Mr. Polk, I knew, held a secret I’d been wanting to understand. He knew death, I suppose. Maybe it was that simple.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

288. “He needed fodder for analysis. But the project was beyond issues of “identity” and “society” and “institutions.” Mine was a quest for a new spirit. I wasn’t going to explain that to Ping Xi. He would think he was understood me. But he couldn’t understand me. He wasn’t supposed to.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

291. “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

292. “On May 28, I came to, knowing this was the last time I would perform my habitual ablutions and take the Infermiterol.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

296. “Sleep is key. Most people need upwards of fourteen hours or so. The modern age has forced us to live unnatural lives. Busy, busy, busy. Go, go, go. You probably work too much.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

297. “Give these a try,” Dr. Tuttle said, sliding a sample bottle of pills across her desk. “Infermiterol. If those don’t put you down for the count, I’ll complain directly to the manufacturer in Germany.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

298. “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

299. “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

300. “A serious rest. My mouth watered. Good strong American sleep. Those pills would scrape out the sludge of Infermiterol left in my mind. Then I’d feel better. Then I’d be set. I’d live easy. I’d think easy. My brain would glide. I looked at the assortment of pills in my palm. Good-bye, bad dream. I wished I had my Polaroid camera to document the scene.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh