Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Psychic diseases get passed around in confined spaces. I sense your mind is too porous.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

302. “I was like a baby being born – the air hurt, the light hurt, the details of the world seemed garish and hostile.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

308. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

315. “All the men I’d ever been with, young as well as old, had been detached and unfriendly.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

317. “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

318. “Avevo paura. La paura sembrava desiderio: all’improvviso volevo tornare in tutti i luoghi in cui ero stata, in ogni strada che avevo percorso, ogni stanza in cui mi ero seduta. Volevo rivedere tutto. Cercai di ricordare la mia vita sfogliando le Polaroid che avevo nella mente.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

319. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

321. “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

322. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

324. “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

325. “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

326. “What could be cowardly about the color yellow? Nothing.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

327. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

329. “She was probably my age, but she looked like a woman with a hundred years of suffering behind her-no love, no transformations, no joy, just junk food and bad television, ugly, mean-spirited men creaking in and out of stuffy rooms to take advantage of her womb and impassive heft. One of these obese offspring would soon overtake her throne...”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

330. “They focused on ‘abstract ideas’ and developed drinking problems to blot out the self-loathing they preferred to call ‘existential ennui’.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

331. “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

332. “The videos described were of me talking into the camera, seeming to narrate some personal stories-I cry in one- but Ping Xi had dubbed everything over. Instead of my voice, you heard long, angry voice mails Ping Xi’s mother had left him in Cantonese.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

335. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

337. “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

338. “The worst crime I could commit in his eyes was to do anything for my own pleasure, anything outside of my daughterly duties. Evidence of a will of my own was seen as the ultimate betrayal.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

339. “I slept around in spurts, going out more, then less. Nothing ever panned out in terms of “love.” Reva often spoke about “settling down.” That sounded like death to me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

340. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

342. “Through the thorns to the stars.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

346. “A serious rest. My mouth watered. Good strong American sleep. Those pills would scrape out the sludge of Infermiterol left in my mind. Then I’d feel better. Then I’d be set. I’d live easy. I’d think easy. My brain would glide. I looked at the assortment of pills in my palm. Good-bye, bad dream. I wished I had my Polaroid camera to document the scene.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

347. “I searched for something in his face, anything his mask of contentment might betray, but there was nothing. He was a genius in that sense-a master. His was the best mask I’d ever seen.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

348. “When I stole things I felt I was invincible, as though I had punished the world and rewarded myself, setting things right for once – justice served. I.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

350. “My mother’s body stayed alive for exactly three days. Even with a tube down her throat, a machine taped to her face to keep her breathing, she was still pretty. She was still prim. “Her organs are shutting down,” the doctor explained. System failure.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh