Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “I am glad that my love is greater than your vanity.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

403. “I had started “hibernating” as best I could in mid-June of 2000. I was twenty-six years old. I watched summer die and autumn turn cold and gray through a broken slat in the blinds. My muscles withered. The sheets on my bed yellowed, although I usually fell asleep in front of the television on the sofa, which was from Pottery Barn and striped blue and white and sagging and covered in coffee and sweat stains.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

404. “It was the particular sadness of a young woman who has lost her mother–complex and angry and soft, yet oddly hopeful.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

405. “And what did Grigor really want from Villiam? An apology? All lords were corrupt. If he wanted to live freely, he would have to live like Ina lived, in a hovel. Poverty had its limitations, but if you had nothing, there was nothing to be stolen. He.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

406. “I’m not a junkie or something,” I said defensively. “I’m taking some time off. This is my year of rest and relaxation.” “Lucky you,” Reva said. “I wouldn’t mind taking time off from work to loaf around, watch movies, and snooze all day, but I’m not complaining. I just don’t have that luxury.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

408. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

410. “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

411. “I’m not saying he was an idiot. He was just like me: anything good made him want to die. That’s a characteristic some smart people have.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

412. “But really, by this point, I think I had resigned myself to fate. No stupid movie would save me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

413. “I heard a child ask his young mother, pointing to a bird that looked like a psychedelic crow. Its feathers were iridescent black, a rainbow reflected in the gleaming darkness, eyes bright white and alive, vigilant. “A grackle,” the woman replied.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

414. “I wanted the old half life back.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

415. “I didn’t want her to leave. The white glare off the overhead light gleamed across her collarbones. She was beautiful, with all her nerves and all her complicated, circuitous feelings and contradictions and fears.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

416. “But Rebecca was no hussy. She was divine.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

417. “He had flattered me, and reminded me that my stupidity and vanity were still well intact.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

418. “Days slipped by obliquely, with little to remember... Nothing seemed really real. Sleeping, waking, it all collided into one gray, monotonous plane ride through the clouds.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

419. “They want good meat on your bones before they eat you alive.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

420. “What I mean to say is that I was not fundamentally unattractive. I was just invisible.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

421. “The very fact that other people moved their bowels filled me with awe.” p. 110-111.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

422. “Once Villiam caught his breath, he thanked the nun, promised her fine hospitality as long as she cared to stay, and then went on eating, a bit more carefully this time, engaging the priest in a long discussion of hell, its landscape, its economy, what kind of house the Devil lived in, how he managed his servants, and how he had escaped into the realm of Earth. And then he asked, as though he might be serious, ‘How long will God keep heaven’s gate closed? Hypothetically speaking.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

423. “The sound of tires on the wet pavement. A window was open so I could hear it. The sweet smell of spring crept in. The world was out there still, but I hadn’t looked at it in months. It was too much to consider it all, stretching out, a circular planet covered in creatures and things growing, all of it spinning slowly on an axis created by what-some freak accident? It seemed implausible. The world could be flat just as easily as it could be round. Who could prove anything?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

424. “She was a slave to vanity and status, which was not unusual in a place like Manhattan, but I found her desperation especially irritating. It made it hard for me to respect her intelligence.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

425. “It’s a romantic story and it may not be accurate at this point since I’ve gone over it again and again for years whenever I’ve felt it necessary or useful to cry. Looking.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

426. “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

427. “She workshipped me, but she also hated me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

428. “I desperately hoped I could avoid ever having to resemble a grown woman. I didn’t see that any good could come of that.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

429. “Up on my floor, I opened the garbage chute in the hallway and stuffed the roses down, but I kept the card. However much Ping Xi disgusted me – I didn’t respect him or his art, I didn’t want to know him, I didn’t want him to know me – he had flattered, and reminded me of my stupidity and vanity were still well intact. A good lesson.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

430. “You seem depressed,” she said with concern. I said I wasn’t depressed; I was just bored. I hadn’t considered that if the only thing that keeps you going all day is knowing you’ll get to turn on the TV after dinner, you probably are depressed.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

431. “It all seemed so trite. “Why tell stories?” he wondered aloud. “As soon as something is over, that’s it. Why revive it constantly? Things happen, and then more things, inevitably, happen next. So?” He shrugged. His hands trembled. He tried to smile, but he was now, indeed, terribly overcome.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

435. “Life was chaos. There were no rewards. Best to make the time tolerable, at least.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

436. “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

437. “My father had warned when I’d started there at age twenty-one, naive beyond reproach, that the most dangerous individuals in a prison are not the criminals but the very people who work there. I can confirm this to be true. Those were perhaps the wisest words my father ever told me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

438. “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

439. “Maybe I did take some pleasure in aiding her self-destruction by buying her booze, but I didn’t want my mother to die. It wasn’t like that.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

440. “Reva was a magnet for my angst. She sucked it right out of me. I was a Zen Buddhist monk when she was around. I was above fear, above desire, above worldly concerns in general. I could live in the now in her company. I had no past or present. No thoughts. I was too evolved for all her jibber-jabber. And too cool. Reva could get angry, impassioned, depressed, ecstatic. I wouldn’t. I refused to. I would feel nothing, be a blank state.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

443. “A handsome man must be terribly cruel to generate such discomfort in the people around him.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

444. “His loyalty was to the gin, and his twisted war against the hoodlums, his imaginary enemies, the ghosts.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

445. “I hoped that they’d had some respect for the stuff they were immortalizing.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

446. “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

447. “I had the feeling, like alone on the road at night, that there was something watching me, something waiting for me to falter, something just hidden in the shadows waiting to pounce. That was God.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

448. “Above the altar a wooden man hung magically bleeding, his head bowed and face hurt but not unhappy. That was God, they told me.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

449. “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

450. “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