Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Nothing calls more attention to one’s odor than a fragrance meant to mask it.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

352. “It was all nonsense, but people loved it.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

353. “He was like that – regretful and arrogant and illogical at once. I don’t think he ever really loved his children. The wedding band he continued to wear years after her death suggested that he’d loved our mother to some degrees at least. But I suspect he was incapable of love, real love. He was a cruel character. Imagining his parents beating him as a child is the only path to forgiveness that I have found so far. It isn’t perfect, but it does the trick.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

354. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

356. “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

357. “I can’t blame Dr. Tuttle for her terrible advice. I elected to be her patient, after all.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

359. “So I was good. I did all the right things. I rebelled in silent ways, with my thoughts.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

360. “To hell with God. And to hell with your father.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

361. “I have always hated the police.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

362. “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

363. “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

364. “The best was when I could see the hard face of a cold-hearted killer breaking through the chubby cheeks and callow softness of youth.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

365. “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

366. “During the school year, all I did was contend with stupidity and ignorance. That’s what teachers are paid to do. How I got stuck teaching Dickens to fourteen-year-olds is a mystery to me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

367. “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

368. “But such was death – it had nothing to say.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

369. “Having never known love before, he couldn’t recognize the feeling. Something was terribly wrong, he felt.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

370. “Passai molto tempo a fissare il soffitto quell’anno, tentando di cancellare pensieri di morte con pensieri di nulla.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “Your problem is that you’re passive. You wait around for things to change, and they never will.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

384. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

386. “I was never allowed to have any pets. Sometimes I think a puppy might have changed everything.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

387. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

389. “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

390. “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

391. “Beauty is the devil’s shade.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

392. “They’ll twist your nose until it smells death in a bed of roses.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

393. “I imagine they were as bored as I was, but they indulged themselves in sugar in dime store paper bags.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

394. “I held the phone close to my heart, caught my breath. I could have squealed with delight. If you’ve been in love, you know this kind of exquisite anticipation, this ecstasy. I was on the brink of something, and I could feel it. I suppose I was in love with Rebecca. She awoke in my heart some long-sleeping dragon. I’ve never felt that fire burning like that again. That day was without a doubt the most exciting day of my life.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

395. “I drank a bottle down and had Johnson pay for a few more and I opened the next one and passed it to Johnson and he took a swig and winced and laughed and passed it back to me, and that was it.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

396. “The bandit didn’t struggle or curse. He said only ‘God forgive you’, the same words Marek had said to him a few days earlier.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

397. “I hated talking to people.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh