7 Quotes & Sayings By Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa Moshfegh is the author of two novels, McGlue (Penguin Press, 2014), which was nominated for both the 2014 National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, and Eileen (Penguin Press, 2015), winner of the 2017 Ontario Library Association's Alex Award. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Tin House, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University where she is also the fiction editor of The Columbia Review.

1
Every time I saw Lacey, she'd gained five more pounds. She was turning into the kind of obese girl who does her hair like a forties pinup and wears bright red lipstick, a blue polka-dot dress with a white doily collar, colorful tattoos across her huge, smushed cleavage, as if these considerations would distract us from how fat and miserable she'd become. Ottessa Moshfegh
2
I’d never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons. Ottessa Moshfegh
3
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
4
I rarely interacted much with anyone back then who wasn't retarded. When I did, it struck me how pompous and impatient they were, always measuring their words, twisting things around. Everybody was so obsessed with being understood. It made me sick. Ottessa Moshfegh
5
I had hard feelings around the holidays, the one time of year I couldn’t help but fall prey to the canned self-pity Christmas prescribes. Ottessa Moshfegh
6
I'm a first - I was the first person in my family born in the United States. My mom is from Croatia, and my dad is from Iran. They met at music school in Belgium. I grew up as a pianist. I was really interested in piano and sort of discovered that I was a writer when I was about 13 and started writing. Ottessa Moshfegh