Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Love me and I’ll turn a blind eye to your faults.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

252. “I watched summer die and autumn turn cold and gray through a broken slat in the blinds.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

253. “But coming out of that sleep was excruciating. My entire life flashed before my eyes in the worst way possible, my mind refilling itself with all my lame memories, every little thing that had brought me to where I was.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

254. “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

255. “We’re mostly empty space. We’re mostly nothing. Tra-la-la. And we’re all the same nothingness. You and me, just filling the space with nothingness.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

256. “But I was tall and thin and blond and pretty and young. Even at my worst, I knew I still looked good.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

257. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

259. “I never got a good look at Dr. Tuttle’s eyes. I suspect that they were crazy eyes, black and shiny, like a crow’s. The pen she used was long and purple and had a purple feather at the end of it.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

260. “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

261. “People will tell you the truth, if you really want to hear it.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

262. “My father had warned when I’d started there at age twenty-one, naive beyond reproach, that the most dangerous individuals in a prison are not the criminals but the very people who work there. I can confirm this to be true. Those were perhaps the wisest words my father ever told me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

263. “The terrain of my face was heavy with soft, rumbling acne scars blurring whatever delight or madness lay beneath that cold and deadly New England exterior.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— 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. “And when I was awake, I wasn’t fully so, but in a kind of murk, a dim state between the real and the dream. I got sloppy and lazy at work, grayer, emptier, less there. This pleased me, but having to do things became very problematic. When people spoke, I had to repeat what they’d said in my mind before understanding it.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

268. “And if she just wants to major in English or something like that, it doesn’t really matter where she goes.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

269. “Suspicion invites danger, doesn’t it? Keep the imagination soft and happy, and only good things will come.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

270. “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

271. “Soon we’ll be old and ugly. Life is short, you know? Die young and leave a beautiful corpse.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

272. “I skipped out down the shoveled path and into the black and sparkling wet street. I was on my way to meet my destiny.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

273. “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

274. “I lie down, I want a drink. I cannot sleep without having already forgotten my name, my face, my life.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

275. “And then, as if I’d summoned her with my mundane cynicism, Reva was knocking on my door once again.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “They’ll twist your nose until it smells death in a bed of roses.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

280. “Talking to Reva about misery was insufferable. ‘Look on the bright side,’ was what she wanted everyone to do.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

281. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

283. “I have always hated the police.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

284. “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

285. “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

286. “I’d never been to the kind of party in the Polaroid photos.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

287. “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

288. “There was majesty and grace in the pace of the swaying branches of the willows. There was kindness. Pain is not the only touchstone for growth, I said to myself.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

289. “But Rebecca was no hussy. She was divine.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

290. “Sleeping, waking, it all collided into one gray, monotonous plane ride through the clouds. I didn’t talk to myself in my head. There wasn’t much to say. This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

291. “She had a wisdom that nobody could recognize; the deaths of her children hadn’t torn the innocence from her heart, but had calloused her against her own rage. She knew that fighting was pointless. As a woman, she would always lose. It was not her place to stage a battle, but to back away to preserve what life she had left to live.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

292. “Neither creation or sacrifice could lead a person to heaven.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

293. “He had flattered me, and reminded me that my stupidity and vanity were still well intact.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

294. “I don’t know if it was the directness and certitude of his statement that rattled me-he was always clinical, always rational, always dry-or that his death was no longer just an idea-it was happening, it was real-or if, during the week I’d spent by his side, we had bonded without my knowledge or consent and, all of a sudden, I loved him.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

295. “Days slipped by obliquely, with little to remember... Nothing seemed really real. Sleeping, waking, it all collided into one gray, monotonous plane ride through the clouds.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

296. “My own startled face startled me... I got close to the mirror and looked very carefully. There I was, a tiny dark reflection of myself deep down in my right pupil. Someone said once that pupils were just empty space, black holes, twin caves of infinite nothingness. ‘When something disappears, that’s usually where it disappears – into the black holes in our eyes.’ I couldn’t remember who had said it. I watched my reflection disappear in the steam.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

297. “It’s a romantic story and it may not be accurate at this point since I’ve gone over it again and again for years whenever I’ve felt it necessary or useful to cry. Looking.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

298. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

300. “I didn’t really want to die. I didn’t always want to live, but I wasn’t going to kill myself.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh