Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “There was majesty and grace in the pace of the swaying branches of the willows. There was kindness. Pain is not the only touchstone for growth, I said to myself.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

352. “But Rebecca was no hussy. She was divine.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

353. “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

354. “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

355. “Neither creation or sacrifice could lead a person to heaven.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

356. “He had flattered me, and reminded me that my stupidity and vanity were still well intact.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

357. “I don’t know if it was the directness and certitude of his statement that rattled me-he was always clinical, always rational, always dry-or that his death was no longer just an idea-it was happening, it was real-or if, during the week I’d spent by his side, we had bonded without my knowledge or consent and, all of a sudden, I loved him.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

358. “Days slipped by obliquely, with little to remember... Nothing seemed really real. Sleeping, waking, it all collided into one gray, monotonous plane ride through the clouds.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

359. “My own startled face startled me... I got close to the mirror and looked very carefully. There I was, a tiny dark reflection of myself deep down in my right pupil. Someone said once that pupils were just empty space, black holes, twin caves of infinite nothingness. ‘When something disappears, that’s usually where it disappears – into the black holes in our eyes.’ I couldn’t remember who had said it. I watched my reflection disappear in the steam.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

360. “It’s a romantic story and it may not be accurate at this point since I’ve gone over it again and again for years whenever I’ve felt it necessary or useful to cry. Looking.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

361. “I’m like a beautiful tortoise. I don’t waste my energy. Life is precious to me now.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

362. “I didn’t really want to die. I didn’t always want to live, but I wasn’t going to kill myself.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

367. “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

368. “My thoughts were banal.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

381. “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

382. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

384. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

391. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

393. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

396. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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