Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Would she suddenly grow into maturity and discard me as a relic from a failed past, the way I’d hoped to do to her when my year of sleep was over?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

302. “And she had said that a small percentage of people taking the kind of medications she prescribed for me reported having hallucinations during their waking hours.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

303. “I see your game. You’ve trying to shame me for being young and pretty. You want to make me apologize for all the other girls who didn’t like you. You just can’t stand that I’m right next door reminding you of all that. That’s it, isn’t it? Pump and dump,” she scoffed. “Nothing you say can hurt me. See if you can do it. I dare you.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

304. “Life itself was like a book borrowed from a library, something that didn’t belong to me and was due to expire.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

305. “He made a living sitting still, just thinking things and writing them down, convincing others that what he thought and wrote was correct, and in this way, the world was supposed to change? His work was that powerful? I was sick of theory. What mattered was what a person did, not what they went around pontificating about!”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

306. “My thoughts were banal.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

308. “I let her do whatever she wanted to do to me that day in the cabin. It wasn’t painful, nor was it terrifying, but it was disgusting – just as I’d always hoped it to be.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

309. “Rebecca had invited me into her home, allowed me to see her in her natural state, however slovenly and nervous. That was friendship.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

310. “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

311. “They made her do the worst of the work at the abbey – cleaning the latrines, slaughtering the animals, sleeping with the dogs at night. God had not appeared to her in all that time. So she preferred to stay faithless rather than hold on to a fantasy. It.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

312. “I tried to remember my life, flipping through Polaroids in my mind.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

313. “It’s like it all never happened,’ they said, and nobody spoke of the people they’d eaten, though the absence of certain families was acute at Sunday Mass – half the pews sat empty. The.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

314. “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

315. “His one regret in life, he said, was that he’d never been able to grow a real beard, as though he could have willed it, but he had failed to. He was like that – regretful and arrogant and illogical at once.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

317. “Through the thorns to the stars.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

318. “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

319. “Of course, I was grateful to be spared the humiliation of a patronizing confrontation by a dozen young women who would probably have just shamed me for not “being more open.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

320. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

322. “That was how life seemed to be finding things to do to pass the time. The less I’d looked at the clock, the better I knew I’d enjoyed my day.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

323. “She thought she was sophisticated – she liked fine clothes, good liquor – but she knew nothing about art. She didn’t read anything but romance novels. There were no freshly cut flowers around the house. She mostly watched TV and smoked in bed all day, as far as I could tell. That was her ‘culture’.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

324. “He knew how to manipulate me – I had to respect him for that at least, however much I hated him for it.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

325. “I took the note out and read it as a reminder of what she’d actually been like and how little she cared about me. It helped. Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

326. “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

327. “Grigor looked around. Everything he could see – the great room, the finery, the food, the lord’s spectacular Christmas costume, none of it inspired him. It was not God’s fortune, but the bounty of a thief: Villiam hadn’t worked for his blessings. The villagers had.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

329. “There’s a rumor going around that the artist gets the dogs as puppies, raises them, then kills them when they’re the size he wants. He locks them in an industrial freezer because that’s the most humane way to euthanize them without compromising the look of the animal. When they thaw, he can get them into whatever position he wants.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

331. “He had expected the priest to be a large, virile northerner – he’d imagined that any man of authority must have blue eyes – but he looked like an average Lapvonian, only dressed in a long black robe.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

332. “There was to be no narrative that I could follow, no pieces for me to put together. Even a shade of cuiosity could sabotage my mission to clear my mind, purge my associations, refresh and renew the cells in my brain, my eyes, my nerves, my heart.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

333. “Next to the vitamins, there was a contraption to measure your blood pressure and pulse. I sat in the seat of the machine, took my arm out of the sleeve of my coat and stuck it in for testing.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

334. “Now let me ask you a technical question. Do you have any heroes?” “I guess Whoopi Goldberg is my hero.” “A family friend?” “She took care of me after my mother died,” I said. Who hadn’t heard of Whoopi Goldberg?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

335. “This is the story of how I disappeared.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

336. “Looking at my reflection really did soothe me, though I hated my face with a passion. Such is the life of the self-obsessed.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

337. “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

338. “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

339. “We’re all alone, Reva,” I told her. It was true: I was, she was. This was the maximum comfort I could offer.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

340. “Her greed would unburden me of my own vanity.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

341. “I sensed Reva’s misery in the room with me. It was the particular sadness of a young woman who has lost her mother–complex and angry and soft, yet oddly hopeful. I recognized it. But I didn’t feel it inside of me. The sadness was just floating around in the air.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

342. “My favorite days were the ones that barely registered.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

343. “Pain is not the only touchstone for growth.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

344. “This is like waiting for a train to hell,” she whipered at some point, not to me directly, but up at the chapel ceiling. “I’m exhausted.” Highway to hell. Slow road to hell. Express bus. Taxicab. Rowboat. First-class ticket. Hell was the only destination she ever used in her metaphors.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

345. “I once asked her whether her jealousy had anything to do with her being Jewish, if she thought things came easier to me because I was a WASP.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

346. “You will be so happy and free, you’ll sing.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

347. “Any function of the body that one hid behind closed doors titillated me. I recall one of my early relationships – not a heavy love affair, just a light one – was with a Russian man with a wonderful sense of humor who permitted me to squeeze the pus from his pimples on his back and shoulders. To me, this was the greatest intimacy.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

348. “I recall waking up to two shiny nickels under my pillow once. What shocked me was not the transformation from tooth to silver, but the idea that I had slept through the disturbance of my mother or father sneaking in during the night, that I had been unconscious, completely unaware, vulnerable. I remember my question that morning – what else had they done to me in my sleep? I’ve often wondered about everything I may have slept through, what arguments, what secrets.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

349. “Charm is not a hairstyle. You either have it or you don’t. The more you try to be fashionable, the tackier you’ll look.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

350. “Try to sleep on your side when possible. There was recently a study in Australia that said that when you sleep on your back, you’re more likely to have nightmares about drowning. It’s not conclusive, of course, since they’re on the opposite side of the Earth. So actually, you might want to try sleeping on your stomach instead, and see what that does.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh