Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

364. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

371. “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

372. “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

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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

377. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “My hibernation was self-preservational.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

383. “I hated talking to people.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

384. “Hell was the only destination she ever used in her metaphors.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

385. “This woman was beautiful, and looked vaguely familiar, in the way all beautiful people look familiar. So within 30 seconds I decided she must be an idiot.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

386. “When you die, leave not a trace. Sweep up any evidence of your existence.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

387. “I wasn’t radical at all. I was simply unhappy.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

388. “I love you.” Maybe she did, and that’s why I hated her.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

389. “And he was short. I had never dated a short man before. The thought crossed my mind: Perhaps I am learning humility. Perhaps this man is the answer to my prayers.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

390. “She was empty. ‘I am an object in the room,’ she had told herself. ‘That is all that I am.’ This belief spared her the agony of her own intelligence while she was a slave to the nuns.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

392. “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

393. “I would miss that old library. I couldn’t realize at the time how those books had saved me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

394. “The law was all set up to keep people convinced their fears were well-guided. They came up with ways to prove themselves right about people who seemed a little different.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

396. “I was infatuated with her, clearly. And I felt in a way that just by knowing her, I was graduating out of my misery. I was making some progress.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

397. “And he explained something he thought most people didn’t understand about intelligence. “It comes from the heart,” he said, beating his chest with his fist. “It has a lot to do with your blood type. And magnets.” That one gave me pause.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

398. “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

399. “He needed fodder for analysis. But the project was beyond issues of “identity” and “society” and “institutions.” Mine was a quest for a new spirit. I wasn’t going to explain that to Ping Xi. He would think he was understood me. But he couldn’t understand me. He wasn’t supposed to.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

400. “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