Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes & Sayings

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

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 ... — 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

My parents kept a small cabin the mountains. It was a simple thing, just four walls, and very dark inside. A heavy felt curtain blotted out whatever light made it through the canopy of huge pines and down into the cabin's only window. There was a queen-size bed in there, an armchair, and a wood-burning stove. It wasn't an old cabin. I think my parents built it in the seventies from a kit. In a few spots the wood beams were branded with the word HOME-RITE. But the spirit of the place me think of simpler times, olden days, yore, or whenever it was that people rarely spoke except to say there was a store coming or the berries were poisonous or whatnot, the bare essentials. It was deadly quiet up there. You could hear your own heart beating if you listened. I loved it, or at least I thought I ought to love it - I've never been very clear on that distinction. — Ottessa Moshfegh

I didn't like dogs. Not because they scared me - they didn't - but because their deaths were so much harder to take than people's. — Ottessa Moshfegh

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

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

As one might guess, I was easily roused by the grosser habits of the human body--toilet business not least of all. The very fact that other people moved their bowels filled me with awe. 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. Before that, still young and neurotic, just allowing a man to listen to me urinate was utter humiliation, torture, and therefore, I thought, proof of profound love and trust — Ottessa Moshfegh

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

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

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 — Ottessa Moshfegh

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. — Ottessa Moshfegh

Furthermore, as is typical for any isolated, intelligent young person, I thought I was the only one with any consciousness, any awareness of how odd it was to be alive, to be a creature on this strange planet Earth. — Ottessa Moshfegh

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

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. — 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

Once I finished 'Eileen,' I wanted to write more novels. I don't see myself stopping any time soon. — 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

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. — Ottessa Moshfegh

Some families are so sick, so twisted, the only way out is for someone to die. — Ottessa Moshfegh

I rarely interacted much with anyone back then who wasn't retarded. When I did, it struck me how pompous and impatient they were, always measuring their words, twisting things around. Everybody was so obsessed with being understood. It made me sick. — Ottessa Moshfegh

I was really interested in piano and sort of discovered that I was a writer when I was about 13 and started writing. And it was my secret thing and my passion. — Ottessa Moshfegh

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. — Ottessa Moshfegh

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

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

I was the first person in my family born in the United States. My mom is from Croatia, and my dad is from Iran. They met at music school in Belgium. I grew up as a pianist. — Ottessa Moshfegh

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

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

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. — Ottessa Moshfegh

I'm a first - I was the first person in my family born in the United States. My mom is from Croatia, and my dad is from Iran. They met at music school in Belgium. I grew up as a pianist. I was really interested in piano and sort of discovered that I was a writer when I was about 13 and started writing. — Ottessa Moshfegh

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

I've always really enjoyed sharing my work with others. I find it really hard if I don't think the work will exist outside of my own apartment. — Ottessa Moshfegh

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. — 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

Think about every time you've seen someone being objectified, abused, enslaved. We see it constantly on the TV, in magazines, on the Internet. We've become numb, so we do nothing. The accumulation of passivity might make reading about that exploitation uncomfortable. And sometimes when I'm writing, I think of it like this: "People seem to like garbage, so here is what garbage smells like ... " — Ottessa Moshfegh

Anyway, I don't trust those people who poke around sad people's minds and tell them how interesting it all is up there. It's not interesting. — Ottessa Moshfegh

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

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

People truly engaged in life have messy houses. — Ottessa Moshfegh

It's easy to tell the dirtiest minds - look for the cleanest fingernails. — Ottessa Moshfegh

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. — 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