Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

306. “During the school year, all I did was contend with stupidity and ignorance. That’s what teachers are paid to do. How I got stuck teaching Dickens to fourteen-year-olds is a mystery to me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

308. “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

309. “I couldn’t even locate where my emotions came from. My brain? It made no sense. Irritation was what I knew best – a heaviness on my chest, a vibration in my neck like my head was revving up before it would rocket off my body.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

311. “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

312. “The best was when I could see the hard face of a cold-hearted killer breaking through the chubby cheeks and callow softness of youth.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “Good strong American sleep.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

317. “The heart is a moody, greedy thing, I suppose.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

322. “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

323. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

330. “I plunged into sleep full force once this arrangement had been made. It was an exciting time in my life. I felt hopeful. I felt I was on my way to a great transformation.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

331. “I spent many hours watching his biceps flick and pump as he turned each page of his comic book. When I imagine him now, I think of the way he’d swerve a toothpick around in his mouth. It was beautiful. It was poetry. I asked him once, nervous and ridiculous, whether he felt cold wearing just short sleeves in winter. He shrugged. Still waters ran deep, I thought, nearly swooning.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

342. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

345. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

348. “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

349. “I have always hated the police.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh