Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “I can’t blame Dr. Tuttle for her terrible advice. I elected to be her patient, after all.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

402. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

406. “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

407. “I have always hated the police.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

408. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

418. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

421. “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

422. “Could Marek be just another babe to care for? Oh, that would be nice, wouldn’t it? To be pitied just once? Didn’t God owe him that, after all the horror he had endured?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

424. “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

425. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

427. “Walter had told me stories of the war, and they were worse than vampire books. They didn’t seem at all real either. It was dumb and cruel that anyone had to die at any moment they weren’t ready for, if they still felt there was more life to live.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

428. “I don’t like the term ‘dream journal,’” she told me at our in-person appointment in June. “I prefer ’night vision log.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

431. “She could deny her flesh, but she was still human.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

433. “My thoughts were banal.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

434. “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

435. “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

436. “He liked to tell me that I was the source of my own misery, that I was choosing to believe that my life was limited, boring. He explained that everything was possible, and moreover, everything – every thing and scenario – existed in infinite versions throughout the galaxies and beyond. I knew it was a childish belief, but I had adopted it anyway. Imagining infinite realities made whatever nuisance I had to withstand more tolerable. I was more than myself.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

437. “I really despised him, everyone.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

438. “I’d never planned on working all my life. I’d had this fantasy that I’d get married and suddenly find a calling beyond the humiliating need to make a living. Art or charity work, babies – something like that.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

439. “There was no sadness or nostalgia, only disgust that I’d wasted so much time on unnecessary labor when I could have been sleeping and feeling nothing.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

440. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

442. “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

443. “Sometimes something new can remind you of something you lost.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

446. “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

447. “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

448. “Beauty is the devil’s shade.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh