Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes

He and I agreed that people looked stupid when they were "having a good time.

On a good day, every small thing is enchanting. Everything is a miracle. There is no emptiness. There is no need for forgiveness or escape or medicine. I hear only the wind in the trees, and my devils hatching their sacral plans, fusing all the shattered pieces together into a blanket of ice. I have found that it's under that ice that I can feel I am just another normal person. In the dark and cold, I am at 'peace.

It's remarkable what people become blind to when they're in such darkness.

I hoped they saw right through my death mask to my sad and fiery soul, though I doubt they saw me at all.

It was lunacy, this idea, that I could sleep myself into a new life. Preposterous. But there I was, approaching the depths of my journey

There are alternatives to medication, though they tend to have more disruptive side effects."

"Like what?"

"Have you ever been in love?"

"In what sense?"

"We'll cross that road when we come to it.

How'd you do?" I remember the shopgirl asked, as though I may have done well or poorly. Why was my performance always called into question? Of course the dress looked awful on me. The shopgirl must have predicted that. But why was it I who had failed, and not the dress? "How did the dress do?" Is what she should have asked instead.

And anyway, there is no comfort here on Earth. There is pretending, there are words, but there is no peace. Nothing is good here. Nothing. Every place you go on Earth, there is more nonsense.

Things were alive. Life buzzed between each shade of green, from dark pines and supple ferns to lime green moss growing on a huge, dry gray rock. Honey locusts and ginkgos aflare in yellows. What was cowardly about the color yellow? Nothing

I always thought it was pathetic that Reva had chosen to stay in the area after graduation, but passing through it in the cab, in my frenzied state of despair, I understood: there was stability in living in the past.

Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.

That is what I imagined life to be-one long sentence of waiting out the clock.

I lay awake for a long time. It was like sitting in a cinema after the lights go down, waiting for the previews to begin. But nothing was happening. I regretted the coffee.

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.

Tell me everything!" she'd cry, salivating. Poor Reva. She might actually have thought I was capable of sharing things. "Friends forever?" She'd want us to make some sacred pact. She always wanted to make pacts. "Let's make a pact to have brunch at least twice a month. Let's promise to go for a walk through Central Park every Saturday. Let's have a daily call-time. Will you swear to take a ski trip this year? It burns so many calories.

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.

The second hand on the clock shook and bolted forward like someone at first terrified with anxiety, then, bolstered by desperation, jumping off a cliff only to get stuck in midair.

The first time I met Dr. Tuttle, she wore a foam neck brace because of a "taxi accident" and was holding an obese tabby, whom she introduced as "my eldest.

Soon, I'd be home again. Soon, God willing, I'd be asleep.

I found my way into the Met one afternoon in early September. I guess I wanted to see what other people had done with their lives, people who had made art alone, who had stared long and hard at bowls of fruit.

Here is how I spend my days now. I live in a beautiful place. I sleep in a beautiful bed. I eat beautiful food. I go for walks through beautiful places. I care for people deeply. At night my bed is full of love, because I alone am in it. I cry easily, from pain and pleasure, and I don't apologize for that. In the mornings I step outside and I'm thankful for another day. It took me many years to arrive at such a life.

I felt both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you'd feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide. Not that what I was doing was suicide. In fact, it was the opposite of suicide. My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought it was going to save my life.

If you want something and can't have it, want something else. Want what you deserve. You'll probably get it.

I was trapped. The day would be hell. I would suffer. I felt I might not survive. I needed a dark, quiet room, my videos, my bed, my pills. I hadn't been this far from home in many months. I was frightened.

The idea that my brains could be untangled, straightened out, and thus refashioned into a state of peace and sanity was a comforting fantasy.

The ocean beyond like a canyon of woe, tumbling and icy all day and night, was so thunderous, I pictured God himself emerging from the water, laughing at us all in spite.

I loved Reva, but I didn't like her anymore. We'd been friends since college, long enough that all we had left in common was our history together, a complex circuit of resentment, memory, jealousy, denial, and a few dresses I'd let Reva borrow, which she'd promised to dry clean and return but never did.

I've always known what I'm meant to do. The path of my life has been about discovering what I need to do to support myself as a writer.

Puberty extends into your twenties, for sure, and some people don't get over that until much later in life. I feel like I'm just starting to get over puberty - basically twenty years of insufferable, totally self-obsessed hell.

Walter and I had shared a mind, of course. Couples get that way. I think it has something to do with sharing a bed. The mind, untethered during sleep, travels up and away, dancing, sometimes in partners. Things pass back and forth in dreams.

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.

I can't point to any one event that resulted in my decision to go into hibernation. Initially, 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. I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me.

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.

I learned the long way about love, tried every house on the block before I got it right. Now, finally, I love alone.

I've lived with many alcoholic men over the years, and each has taught me that it is useless to worry, fruitless to ask why, suicide to try to help them. They are who they are for better and worse.

Mind over matter, people say. But what is matter, anyway? When you look at it under a microscope, it's just tiny bits of stuff. Atomic particles. Sub-atomic particles. Look deeper and deeper and eventually you'll find nothing. We're mostly empty space. We're mostly nothing. Tra-la-la. And we're all the same nothingness. You and me, just filling the space with nothingness. We could walk through walls if we put our minds to it, people say. What they don't mention is that walking through a wall would most likely kill you. Don't forget that.

Pondering all this down in Reva's black room under her sad, pilly sheets, I felt nothing. I could think of feelings, emotions, but I couldn't bring them up in me. I couldn't even locate where my emotions came from. My brain? It made no sense. Irritation was what I knew best - a heaviness on my chest, a vibration in my neck like my head was revving up before it would rocket off my body. But that seemed directly tied to my nervous system - a physiological response. Was sadness the same kind of thing? Was joy? Was longing? Was love?

And yet I was aware of the nothingness. I was awake in the sleep, somehow. I felt good. Almost happy.

I feel very, very alone."

"We're all alone, Reva," I told her. It was true: I was, she was. This was the maximum comfort I could offer.

On our first date, he bought me a taco, talked at length about the ancients' theories of light, how it streams at angles to align events in space and time, that it is the source of all information, determines every outcome, how we can reflect it to summon aliens using mirrored bowls of water. I asked what the point of it all was, but he didn't seem to hear me. 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.

My first impression of him was that he was free spirited, clever, funny. That proved to be completely inaccurate.

I couldn't be bothered to deal with fixing things. I preferred to wallow in the problem, dream of better days.

The world was out there still, but I hadn't looked at it in months. It was too much to consider in 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.

I don't like talking too much about my personal life, but it all goes into my work.

People died all the time. Why couldn't I?

I could plan to do something and then find myself doing the opposite.

A grown woman is like a coyote--she can get by on very little. Men are more like house cats. Leave them alone for too long and they'll die of sadness

The Weirdos

On our first date, he bought me a taco, talked at length about the ancients' theories of light, how it streams at all angles to align events in space and time, that it is the source of all information, determines every outcome, how we can reflect it to summon aliens using mirrored bowls of water.

Violence was just another function of the body, no less unusual than sweating or vomiting. It sat on the same shelf as sexual intercourse. The two got mixed up quite often, it seemed. For

I didn't believe in heaven, but I did believe in hell.

It's insane that people have these Internet identities. It has very little to do with who we really are. As a writer, who I'm friends with, how I spend my time, what I look like, what I wear, what I eat, what kind of music I like - it's totally not important to the work.

Now write this down because I have a feeling you're too psychotic to remember: Saturday, January twentieth, at two o'clock. And try the Infermiterol. Bye-bye.

I was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you'd feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide.

I flipped it over: Ping Xi's business card with his name, number, e-mail address, and the corniest quotation I'd ever read: "Every act of creation is an act of destruction. - Pablo Picasso

I wasn't entirely awake, but I couldn't cross the line into sleep. 'Go. Go on. The abyss is right there. Just a few more steps.' But I was too tired to break through the glass.

The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine.

My dad is a gentle and brilliant Iranian violinist.

She was an expert at conflating canned advice with any excuse for drinking to oblivion.

I got sloppy and lazy at work, 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.

What's inspiring me the most [is] injustice. My own growth as a member of the human race, in terms of the veils being lifted, seeing more of the beauty and also the horror. A sense of my own purpose in this life. Love ...

I went home and went to sleep. Outside of the occasional irritation, I had no nightmares, no passions, no desires, no great pains.

I've found that people get particularly frustrated and shut down when women in fiction are disgusting or disordered.

I felt I needed to hide a little. My mind needed a smaller world to roam.

In the distance, people were living lives, having fun, learning, making money, fighting and walking around and falling in and out of love. People were being born, growing up, dropping dead. Trevor was probably spending his Christmas vacation with some woman in Hawaii or Bali or Tulum. He was probably fingering her at that very moment, telling her he loved her. He might actually be happy. I shut the window and lowered all the blinds.

I love art because I feel that it's evidence of the great shared universal power. I like art that feels real, that cuts the bullshit.

I still couldn't accept that Trevor was a loser and a moron. I didn't want to believe that I could have degraded myself for someone who didn't deserve it. I was still stuck on that bit of vanity. But I was determined to sleep it away.

You can see wealth in people no matter what they're wearing. It's in the cut of their chins, a certain gloss to the skin, a drag and pause to their responsiveness. When poor people hear a loud noise, they whip their heads around. Wealthy people finish their sentences, then just glance back.

I'll lend you my confidence boosting CD set," she would say if I alluded to any concern or worry . . .

Every few weeks, she had a whole new paradigm for living, and I had to hear about it. "Get good at knowing when you're tired," she'd advised me once. "Too many women wear themselves thin these days." A lifestyle tip from Get the Most Out of Your Day, Ladies included the suggestion to preplan your outfits for the workweek on Sunday evenings.

"That way you won't be second-guessing yourself in the morning."

I really hated when she talked like that.

Having a trash chute was one of my favorite things about my building. 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 had touched. I was contributing. I was connecting.

A friend is someone who helps you hide the body - that

All I had to offer were my skills as a doormat, a blank wall, someone desperate enough to do anything - just short of murder, let's say - simply to get someone to like me, let alone love me.

Life was repetitive, resonated at a low hum.

An interesting book about possums. Animals have so much wisdom," Dr. Tuttle paused. "I hope you're not a vegetarian," she said, lowering her glasses.

"I'm not."

"That's a relief.

I don't care about being a literary personality - that doesn't appeal to me, especially because the literary world doesn't appeal to me. I actually don't feel like I even belong in it. If this was high school, I would be sitting with the Goths, looking at everyone, being like, 'Whatever.'

It was already getting dark out, but I kept my sunglasses on. I didn't want to have to look anybody in the eye. I didn't want to relate to anybody too keenly. Plus, the fluorescent lights at the drug store were blinding. If I could have purchased my medications from a vending machine, I would have paid double for them.

I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.

Sometimes I feel dead," I told her, "and I hate everybody.

She suggested I keep a log of my dreams as a way of tracking the 'waning intensity of suffering.'

'I don't like the term "dream journal,"' she told me at our in-person appointment in June. 'I prefer "night vision log.

I miss you," she said, her voice cracking a little. Maybe she thought those words would break through to my heart. I'd been taking Nembutals all day.

Every time I saw Lacey, she'd gained five more pounds. She was turning into the kind of obese girl who does her hair like a forties pinup and wears bright red lipstick, a blue polka-dot dress with a white doily collar, colorful tattoos across her huge, smushed cleavage, as if these considerations would distract us from how fat and miserable she'd become.

But I was still anxious. Trevor Trevor Trevor. 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. My nerves were frayed and fragile, like tattered silk. Sleep had not yet solved my crankiness, my impatience, my memory. It seemed like everything was now somehow linked to getting back what I'd lost. I could picture my selfhood, my past, my psyche like a dump truck filled with trash. Sleep was the hydraulic piston that lifted the bed of the truck up, ready to dump everything out somewhere, but Trevor was stuck in the tailgate, blocking the flow of garbage. I was afraid things would be like that forever.

I needed a way out of this - the bathroom, the pills, the sleeplessness, the failed, stupid life.

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. I pictured what a documentary film crew would capture in my face as I glimpsed this whole new world before me, like in those home improvement shows Reva liked to watch when she came over. First, I'd cringe with surprise. But then, once my eyes adjusted to the light, they'd grow wide and glisten with awe. I'd drop the keys and the coffee and wander in, spinning around with my jaw hanging open, shocked at the transformation of my dim, gray apartment into a paradise of realized dreams. But what would it look like exactly? I had no idea. When I tried to imagine this new place, all I could come up with was a cheesy mural of a rainbow, a man in a white bunny costume, a set of dentures in a glass, a huge slice of watermelon on a yellow plate - an odd prediction, maybe, of when I'm ninety-five and losing my mind in an assisted-living facility where they treat the elderly residents like retarded children. I should be so lucky, I thought. I opened the door to my apartment, and, of course, nothing had changed.

I'm not a junkie or something," I said defensively. "I'm taking some time off. This is my year of rest and relaxation.

I've heard a sip of gin will make you immune to mosquitoes and other pests.

I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it's her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I'll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.

I've always been interested in family secrets and what happens behind closed doors. I find that fascinating and creepy - that's why I read: because I want to know other people's secrets.

In my own experience, I've found that it's very difficult to make peace with women. We tend to be competitive and feel angry.

I could feel the certainty of a reality leeching out of me like calcium from a bone. I was starving my mind into obliqueness. I felt less and less. Words came and I spoke them in my head, then nestled in on the sound of them, got lost in the music.

For a moment I felt joyful, and then I felt completely exhausted.

I took a Polaroid of her one night and stuck it into the frame of the mirror in the living room. Reva thought it was a loving gesture, but the photo was really meant as a reminder of how little I enjoyed her company if I felt like calling her later while I was under the influence.

Sometimes I felt that my mind was just a soft cloud of air around me, taking in whatever flew in, spinning it around, and then delivering it back out into the ether.

I wondered if I might be dead, and I felt no sorrow, only worry over the afterlife, if it was going to be just like this, just as boring. If I'm dead, I thought, let this be the end. The silliness.

My favorite days were the ones that barely registered. I'd catch myself not breathing, slumped on the sofa, staring at an eddy of dust tumbling across the hardwood floor in the draft, and I'd remember that I was alive for a second, then fade back out.

Her loyalty was absurd. This was what kept us going.

Our repartee would be rich with subtlety and sarcasm, as smart and funny as midcareer Woody Allen. Our fucking, like Werner Herzog, serious and perplexing.

You want to stay here and sleep your life away? That's it?"

"If you knew what would make you happy, wouldn't you do it?" I asked her.

"See, you do want to be happy. Then why did you tell me that being happy is dumb?" she asked. "You said that to me more than once."

"Let me be dumb," I said, glugging the NyQuil. "You go be smart and tell me how great it is. I'll be here, hibernating."

Reva rolled her eyes.

"It's natural," I told her. "People used to hibernate all the time."

"People never hibernated. Where are you getting this?"

She could look really pathetic when she was outraged. She got up and stood there holding her stupid knockoff Kate Spade bag or whatever it was, her hair pulled back into a ponytail and crowned with a useless, plastic, tortoiseshell headband. She was always getting her hair blown out, her eyebrows waxed into thin, arched, parentheses, her fingernails painted various shades of pink and purple, as though all of this made her a wonderful person.

"It's not up for discussion, Reva. This is what I'm doing. If you can't accept it, then you don't have to.

If you look at the horror genre, that work is all about making people uncomfortable by stimulating our fear of death.

I had the vague notion that bearing arms was in poor taste. Unless you were terribly wealthy, hunting was for the brutish lower class, uncivilized country folk, primitive types, people who were dumb and callous and ugly. Violence was just another function of the body, no less unusual than sweating or vomiting. It sat on the same shelf as sexual intercourse. The two got mixed up quite often, it seemed.