Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Not that what I was doing was suicide. In fact, it was the opposite of suicide. My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

252. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

255. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

257. “He went outside, desperate for something, anything – an embrace or a blow to the head.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

258. “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

259. “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

260. “She was beautiful, with all her nerves and all her complicated, circuitous feelings and contradictions and fears.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

262. “I reached for her hand and held it. It was bold of me to make such a move, but I thought we might bond now that we had something so huge in common – a dead man whose last name we shared.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

268. “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

269. “But people lied all the time. It was a part of what kept us whole as individuals. A little lying never hurt anybody. It kept the bounds of what one person was distinct from what another person was.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

270. “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

271. “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

272. “He’d seen a lot of blood today. That was all right. Blood was the wine of the spirit, was it not?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

273. “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

274. “Through the thorns to the stars.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

275. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

277. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

285. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

288. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

291. “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

292. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

300. “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