Eileen Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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

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

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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 ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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

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

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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.' ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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

My dad is a gentle and brilliant Iranian violinist. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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

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

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

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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

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. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh