Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “She’d done everything so many times in her life, she drifted between now and then, often getting lost in between.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

302. “Time was no immemorial. Things were just things.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

303. “She awoke in my heart some long-sleeping dragon.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

304. “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

305. “It always impressed me how predictable Reva was – she was like a character in a movie. Every emotional gesture was always right on cue.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

306. “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

307. “Reva had an interesting method of mixing her drinks. After each sip of Diet Mountain Dew, she’d pour a little Jose Cuervo into the can to take up the space her sip had displaced, so that by the time she finished, she was drinking straight tequila.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

308. “Being pretty only kept me trapped in a world that valued looks above all else.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

314. “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

315. “Makeup made a girl look so desperate, I thought. People were so dishonest with their clothes and personalities.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

316. “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

317. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

319. “Then, on a Sunday morning, my father was suddenly lucid and told me matter-of-factly that he would die in the afternoon.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

321. “It’s the captain. He looks fresh shaved. My own face is covered in little wires that amount to nothing but the look of dirt. It is a kind of dirt, things that grow out from me. It means I have dirt deep inside of me. A head full of dirt, maybe. When I’ve had a few, a nice soft dirt. Otherwise I am livewired, hungry-eyed like a scorned wolf, but give the appearance of a nervous boy, tittering along in search of something, namely, another drink.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “I’d stay home through the blizzard and get some hard sleeping done. I’d return to my old rhythm, my daily rituals. I needed the stability of my familiar routine.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

327. “His own struggles seemed like petty complications, meaningless snags in the dull itinerary that was his life. Why couldn’t he live by instinct and appetite, be primitive, be free?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “The servants’ faith excluded marriage. They didn’t believe a man should own a woman, nor should a man be responsible for her welfare. They believed that everyone should be free to do as they please. The.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

334. “He struck me as a reptilian, small-hearted being, someone placed on a planet to strike a chord with similar people, people who distracted themselves with money and conversation rather than sink their hands and teeth into the world around them. Shallow, I guess. But there were worse people on this Earth.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

335. “But it was all very regulated, I thought. It was all totally aboveboard. I just wanted to sleep all the time. I had a plan. “I’m not a junkie or something,” I said defensively.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

336. “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

337. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

339. “Weekends I was only awake for a few hours a day. 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. I told Dr. Tuttle I was having trouble concentrating. She said it was probably due to “brain mist.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

340. “Una notte la fotografai con la Polaroid e infilai la foto nella cornice dello specchio in soggiorno. Reva pensava fosse un gesto amorevole, ma la foto per me era un memento di quanto poco mi divertiva la sua compagnia se mi veniva voglia di chiamarla quando ero sotto l’effetto di farmaci.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

341. “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

342. “Never trust anyone who holds so strictly to decorum.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

343. “I hated talking to people.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

344. “I had started “hibernating” as best I could in mid-June of 2000. I was twenty-six years old. I watched summer die and autumn turn cold and gray through a broken slat in the blinds. My muscles withered. The sheets on my bed yellowed, although I usually fell asleep in front of the television on the sofa, which was from Pottery Barn and striped blue and white and sagging and covered in coffee and sweat stains.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

345. “What scared her were other people and their immovable selfishness.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

346. “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

347. “I’m not a junkie or something,” I said defensively. “I’m taking some time off. This is my year of rest and relaxation.” “Lucky you,” Reva said. “I wouldn’t mind taking time off from work to loaf around, watch movies, and snooze all day, but I’m not complaining. I just don’t have that luxury.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

348. “I liked looking at things other people had let go of. Maybe the pillowcase I was sniffing had been used on an old man’s deathbed. Maybe this lamp had sat on an end table in an apartment for fifty years. I could imagine all the scenes it had lit: a couple making love on the sofa, thousands of TV dinners, a baby’s tantrums, the honeyed glow of whiskey in an Elks Lodge tumbler. Goodwill indeed.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh