Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes

“I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“For a moment I felt joyful, and then I felt completely exhausted.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Sometimes I feel dead," I told her, "and I hate everybody.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn't exist yet. I was making it, standing there, breathing, fixing the air around my body with stillness, trying to capture something—a thought, I guess—as though such a thing were possible, as though I believed in the delusion described in those paintings—that time could be contained, held captive.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Reva often spoke about 'settling down.' That sounded like death to me.

'I'd rather be alone than anybody's live-in prostitute,' I said to Reva.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I hated them for not worshiping me. Had they no idea of my sacrifice? There I was, perfectly wonderful, and nobody would see that.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick for Another World

“I thought that if I did normal things—held down a job, for example—I could starve off the part of me that hated everything. If I had been a man, I may have turned to a life of crime.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I guess I have a lot of emotion stored up. But it's nothing bad. It's love. It's just love rotting up inside of me . . . That's it . . . I have too much love, I think, and nobody to give it to.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick for Another World

“I wasn't an insomniac, but I was miserable.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Life was repetitive, resonated at a low hum.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Your problem is that you're passive. You wait around for things to change, and they never will.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I still felt that the good things, the things I wanted, belonged to somebody else.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick for Another World

“My brain hurts and I cry all the time. I don't want to be here on Earth for one moment longer.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick for Another World

“I always called back to cancel, which I hated doing because I hated talking to people.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“If, when I woke up in June, life still wasn't worth the trouble, I would end it. I would jump. This was the deal I made.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I tell him I wish I could stay with him, but not here, not on Earth. Earth is the wrong place for me, always was and will be until the day I die.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick for Another World

“I loved it, or at least I thought I ought to love it—I've never been very clear on that distinction.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick for Another World

“We probably shouldn't be friends," I told her, stretching out on the sofa. "I've been thinking about it, and I see no reason to continue.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“His heart growled like a trapped animal, brooding and useless.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick for Another World

“He never knew what to say around her. Everything he wanted to say was 'You are beautiful' and 'I'm in love with you.' There was, in his mind, nothing else for him to say.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick for Another World

“What next? I couldn't imagine.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Once I started sleeping full time, I didn't look out my windows very often. A glimpse was all I ever wanted. The sun rose in the east and set in the west. That hadn't changed, and it never would.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I might have felt better if he were dead, I thought, since behind every memory of him was the possibility of reconciling, and thus more heartbreak and indignity. I felt weak.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“...I remembered watching her 'put her face on', as she called it, and wondering if one day I'd be like her, a beautiful fish in a man-made poor, circling and circling, surviving the tedium only because my memory can contain what is imprinted on the last few minutes of my life, constantly forgetting my thoughts.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Life itself was like a book borrowed from a library, something that didn't belong to me and was due to expire.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“I plunged into sleep full force once this arrangement had been made. It was an exciting time in my life. I felt hopeful. I felt I was on my way to a great transformation.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“It made me feel important, like I was participating in the world. My trash mixed with the trash of others. The things I touched touched things other people has touched. I was contributing. I was connecting.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“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, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“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, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“She thought she was sophisticated -- she liked fine clothes, good liquor -- but she knew nothing about art. She didn't read anything but romance novels. There were no freshly cut flowers around the house. She mostly watched TV and smoked in bed all day, as far as I could tell. That was her 'culture'.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation