321 Quotes by Ottessa Moshfegh

I wanted something to tell me my future was bright. I can imagine myself saying at the time that life itself was like a book borrowed from the library―something that did not belong to me and was due to expire. How silly.

Be careful with women,” he told me. “All they want is love and money.

I'd never planned on working all my life. I'd had this fantasy that I'd get married and suddenly find a calling beyond the humiliating need to make a living. Art or charity work, babies—something like that.

I touched the frame of the painting. And then I placed my whole palm on the dry, rumbling surface of the canvas, simply to prove to myself that there was no god stalking my soul. Time was not immemorial. Things were just things.

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 the dream.

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 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.

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.

There was no sadness or nostalgia, only disgust that I’d wasted so much time on unnecessary labor when I could have been sleeping and feeling nothing.