Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

361. “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

362. “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

363. “I never got a good look at Dr. Tuttle’s eyes. I suspect that they were crazy eyes, black and shiny, like a crow’s. The pen she used was long and purple and had a purple feather at the end of it.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

365. “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

366. “The bed was a king, low to the ground, and whenever I slept in it, I felt very far away from the world, like I was in a spaceship or on the moon. I missed that bed. The stiff blankness of my mother’s eggshell sheets.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

367. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

369. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

371. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

373. “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

374. “He wasn’t interested in understanding himself or evolving. He just wanted to shock people. And he wanted people to love and despise him for it. His audience, of course, would never truly be shocked. People were only delighted at his concepts. He was an art-world hack. But he was successful.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

375. “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

376. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

379. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

385. “Through the thorns to the stars.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

386. “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

387. “Suspicion invites danger, doesn’t it? Keep the imagination soft and happy, and only good things will come.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

392. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

395. “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

396. “There was something strange in her face, a blankness that made her hard to see. He didn’t believe that a man was something holy – the servants’ faith did not recognize holiness in human beings. They didn’t care for Jesus. Flesh was mortal. God was not. God was not alive. God was life itself. And life was invisible. This was why Clod felt he had to make art, to give proof of life.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

397. “Things might be theoretical, that was true. I may be imagining it all, but it still hurt. It was still sad to lose someone you loved.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

398. “We need some solid stuff to hold on to. When I look at you, I see fine loose threads, like a silk cushion that has been rubbed for a hundred years, poor girl.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

400. “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