321 Quotes by Ottessa Moshfegh

Every few weeks, she had a whole new paradigm for living, and I had to hear about it.

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.

It’s the map of my childhood, my sadness, my Eden, my hell and home.

He and I agreed that people looked stupid when they were “having a good time.

I took a Polaroid of her one night and stuck it into the frame of the mirror in the living room. Reva thought it was a loving gesture, but the photo was really meant as a reminder of how little I enjoyed her company if I felt like calling her later while I was under the influence.

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.

The second hand on the clock shook and bolted forward like someone at first terrified with anxiety, then, bolstered by desperation, jumping off a cliff only to get stuck in midair.

Occasionally, over the years, when I’d felt abandoned and scared and heard a voice in my mind say, “I want my mommy,” I took the note out and read it as a reminder of what she’d actually been like and how little she cared about me. It helped. Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.

I still couldn’t accept that Trevor was a loser and a moron. I didn’t want to believe that I could have degraded myself for someone who didn’t deserve it. I was still stuck on that bit of vanity. But I was determined to sleep it away.