Top 500 Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “I’d stay home through the blizzard and get some hard sleeping done. I’d return to my old rhythm, my daily rituals. I needed the stability of my familiar routine.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

402. “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

403. “Psychic diseases get passed around in confined spaces. I sense your mind is too porous.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

404. “I was like a baby being born – the air hurt, the light hurt, the details of the world seemed garish and hostile.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

409. “I hated talking to people.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

413. “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

414. “I really despised him, everyone.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

415. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

417. “What scared her were other people and their immovable selfishness.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

418. “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

419. “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

420. “I liked looking at things other people had let go of. Maybe the pillowcase I was sniffing had been used on an old man’s deathbed. Maybe this lamp had sat on an end table in an apartment for fifty years. I could imagine all the scenes it had lit: a couple making love on the sofa, thousands of TV dinners, a baby’s tantrums, the honeyed glow of whiskey in an Elks Lodge tumbler. Goodwill indeed.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

421. “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

422. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

424. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

426. “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

427. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

429. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

433. “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

434. “Never trust anyone who holds so strictly to decorum.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

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

— Ottessa Moshfegh

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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