Ottessa Moshfegh > Quotes

“Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

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

“Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“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, Eileen

“It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn't exist yet.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“On September 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I'd later learn, but Reva was lost. Reva was gone. I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored. Each time I see the woman leap off the seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—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.”
― 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

“People truly engaged in life have messy houses.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“I was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you'd feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“in my frenzied state of despair, I understood: there was stability in living in the past.”
― 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

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

“Nothing seemed really real. Sleeping, waking, it all collided into one gray, monotonous plane ride through the clouds. I didn't talk to myself in my head. There wasn't much to say. This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I'd disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was my dream.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Maybe they understood, in fact, that beauty and meaning had nothing to do with one another.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“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”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Idealism without consequences is the pathetic dream of every spoiled brat, I suppose.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“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, Eileen

“I had no big plan to become a curator, no great scheme to work my way up a ladder. I was just trying to pass the time. I thought if I did normal things - held down a job, for example - I could starve off the part of me that hated everything.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“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, Eileen

“I wanted to hold onto the house the way you'd hold onto a love letter. It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in the world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn't.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“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.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“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, Eileen

“We don’t forget things, OK? We just choose to ignore them. Can you accept responsibility for your memory lapse and move on?”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Education is directly proportional to anxiety, as you've probably learned, having gone to Columbia.”
― 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

“Only the coffee made my heart work a bit harder. Caffeine was my exercise.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“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, Eileen