Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “The dark, icy night sparkled behind her, the snow and stars a galaxy of hope and wonder with her at its center. She was so alive and lovely.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

302. “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

303. “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

304. “I feel stupid when I pray. – “Anyone,” Demi Lovato.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

305. “No man is worth paying for,” I told her.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “And how nice it was to know that one could forget such things. We are resilient. We suffer, heal, and proceed.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

311. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

313. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

316. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

322. “Each time Ping Xi came over, he was to mark off the days on a calendar hanging on the door to my bedroom. Every three days, I’d wake up, look at the calendar, eat, drink, bathe, et cetera. I would only spend one hour awake each time. I did the math: for the next four months, 120 days total, I would spend only forty hours in a conscious state. “Sweet dreams,” said Ping Xi.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

323. “I suppose a part of me wished when I put my key in the door, it would magically open into a different apartment, a different life, a place so bright with joy and excitement that I’d be temporarily blinded when I first saw it.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

324. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

326. “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

327. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

329. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

332. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

341. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

344. “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

345. “I kept a jar of macadamia nuts by the bed, ate a few whenever I rose to the surface, sucked a bottle of Poland Spring, gravitated to the toilet maybe once a day. I didn’t answer the phone – nobody but Reva ever called me anyway. She left me messages so long and breathless that they got cut off midsentence. Usually she called while she was on the StairMaster at her gym.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

346. “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

347. “I was intensely bored of Reva already. This would be the end of our friendship, I felt.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

348. “Through the thorns to the stars.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh