Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “To hell with God. And to hell with your father.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

352. “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

353. “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

354. “But people lied all the time. It was a part of what kept us whole as individuals. A little lying never hurt anybody. It kept the bounds of what one person was distinct from what another person was.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

355. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

357. “Nothing calls more attention to one’s odor than a fragrance meant to mask it.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “I felt like killing my father, but I didn’t want him to die.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

363. “But maybe I’d need something to read on my ride to my future, I thought. I could borrow a few of the finer books from the X-ville library, disappear and never return them.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

364. “Tissues stained with mascara like crushed inkblot tests piled up on her.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

365. “Perhaps I was lucky after all. It’s very hard to measure out, in hindsight, who had it worse than whom.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

366. “Oxytocin is a hormone released during copulation,” my father went on, staring at the blank wall behind me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

367. “Children built snowmen in their front lawns, played in the yard of the public library. I would miss that old library. I couldn’t realize at the time how those books had saved me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

368. “Real insomniacs suffer hallucinations and lost time and usually have poor memory. It can make life very confusing.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

369. “Boys will be boys,” is all I could think to say. Rebecca just laughed.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

370. “Lying on the grass outside a tennis arena, he held my face toward the sun, stared sideways at my eyeballs, and began to cry. He told me I was the sign he’d been waiting for and, like looking into a crystal ball, he’d just read a private message from God in the silvery vortex of my left pupil.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

371. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

377. “Maybe she should keep the baby, I thought. Maybe a baby would wake her up.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

378. “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

379. “The air in there was heavy with the perfume of cheap cleaning detergents and mildew.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

381. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

383. “My thoughts were banal.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

384. “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

385. “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

386. “Love can reappear, too, but never again unscathed. The second round is inevitably accompanied by doubt, intention, self-disgust.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

391. “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

392. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

394. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

396. “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

397. “I felt hopeful. I felt I was on my way to a great transformation.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

398. “Women killed children all the time. They are the closest to them and suffer the most having to raise them up.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

399. “She wasn’t resting. She was not in a state of peace. She was in no state, not being. The peace to be had, I thought, watching them pull the sheet over her head, was mine.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

400. “I wondered if they’d watched the grapes wither and shrivel up, if they’d had to go to the market to replace them, and if, before they threw the shriveled strand of grapes away, they’d eaten a few.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh