Ottessa Moshfegh > Quotes

“They were all so jovial and relaxed with one another, fraternal even. Maybe I was envious of that. They had lives—that was evident.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I trusted that everything was going to work out fine as long as I could sleep all day.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“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

“I got the feeling that if I moved the frames to the side, I'd see the artists watching me, as though through a two-way mirror, cracking their arthritic knuckles and rubbing their stubbled chins, wondering what I was wondering about them, if I saw their brilliance, or if their lives had been pointless, if only God could judge them after all. Did they want more? Was there more genius to be wrung out of the turpentine rags at their feet? Could they have painted better? Could they have painted more generously? More clearly? Could they have dropped more fruit from their windows? Did they know that glory was mundane? Did they wish they'd crushed those withered grapes between their fingers and spent their days walking through fields of grass or being in love or confessing their delusions to a priest or starving like the hungry souls they were, begging for alms in the city square with some honesty for once? Maybe they'd lived wrongly.

(...)

Or maybe not. Maybe, in the morning, they were aloof and happy to distract themselves with their brushes and oils, to mix their colors and smoke their pipes and go back to their fresh still lives without having to swat away any more flies.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“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, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“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. I was not a narcoleptic—I never fell asleep when I didn’t want to. I was more of a somniac .A somnophile. I had always loved sleeping.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“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

“Nothing made me happy.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick for Another World

“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, 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

“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 felt happy. I hardly felt like myself.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“It's remarkable what people become blind to when they're in such darkness.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“Charm is not a hairstyle. You either have it or you don’t. The more you try to be fashionable, the tackier you’ll look.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I’d been stupid to believe that employment would add value to my life.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Every three days, I’d wake up, look at calendar, eat, drink, bathe, et cetera. I would only spend one hour awake each time. I did the math: for the next four months, 120 days total. I would spend only fourth hours in a conscious state.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“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

“She was beautiful, with all her nerves and all her complicated, circuitous feelings and contradictions and fears.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“The truth was probably that they were just afraid of vaginas, afraid that they’d fail to understand one as pretty and pink as mine, and they were ashamed of their own sensual inadequacies, afraid of their own dicks, afraid of themselves. So they focused on “abstract ideas” and developed drinking problems to blot out the self-loathing they preferred to call “existential ennui.” It was easy to imagine those guys masturbating to Chloë Sevigny, to Selma Blair, to Leelee Sobieski. To Winona Ryder.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“You remind me of a Dutch painting," she said, staring into my eyes. "You have a strange face. Uncommon. Plain, but fascinating. It has a beautiful turbulence hidden in it. I love it. I bet you have brilliant dreams. I bet you dream of other worlds.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

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

“Things might be theoretical, that was true. I may be imagining it all, but it still hurt. It was still sad to lose someone you loved.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“Never trust anyone who holds so strictly to decorum.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

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

“I went home and went to sleep. Outside of the occasional irritation, I had no nightmares, no passions, no desires, no great pains.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“He went outside, desperate for something, anything—an embrace or a blow to the head.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Lapvona

“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.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“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, Homesick for Another World

“Soon, I'd be home again. Soon, God willing, I'd be asleep.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation