113 Quotes About Ottessa-moshfegh

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.

I searched for something in his face, anything his mask of contentment might betray, but there was nothing. He was a genius in that sense-a master. His was the best mask I'd ever seen.

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

I deplored silence. I deplored stillness. I hated almost everything. I was very unhappy and angry all the time. I tried to control myself, and that only made me more awkward, unhappier, and angrier. I was like Joan of Arc, or Hamlet, but born into the wrong life—the life of a nobody, a waif, invisible. There's no better way to say it: I was not myself back then. I was someone else. I was Eileen.

I doubt she deserved the amount of hatred I directed at her, but I loathed just about everybody back then.

That's fair," I said, though my feelings were already hurt.

I thought she seemed smug; she sighed as she ran each stapled bag under the scanner, as though it exhausted her to deal with me and all my mental health issues.

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.

I thought that if I did normal things—held down a job, for example—I could starve off the part of me that hated everything. If I had been a man, I may have turned to a life of crime.