Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes

As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide.

Well, if I'm only a result of past causes, then I'm a victim of those past causes. There is no deeper meaning behind things that gives me a reason to be here.

If we are just specks of dust hit by lightning, if we have no spark of God in us, why not just take whatever we can and devil take the hindmost? I mean, we are fools not to do that if there is no right or wrong.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.

I'm not saying we have power over everything in our lives - if that were true, my hair would look so, so different - but I am saying that there's no circumstance in which we are completely powerless.

I'm in control of the positions that I allow myself to be in.

Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.

If I were to adopt pure mechanism as a philosophy, there would be no way I could choose to be a scholar.

The world is independent of my will.

I am, therefore I'll think.

I am an instrument of purposes that I don't fully understand.

If people knew the story of their lives, how many would then elect to live them?

Each time that you don't know you are choosing, then of those choices you are not the chooser.

I'm not brave enough to be a coward; I see the consequences too clearly.

Choice is destiny's soul mate.

I think I'm in control of what I do and what I've done. I think that's the ultimate feminine power. Do as you want.

We have opted for petty determinisms - childhood trauma, genetic inheritance, social conditioning, etc. - that have made us comparatively passive. We seem to prefer to find excuses - which are really nothing more than the embrace of determinism, a sort of Stockholm syndrome relative to whatever we can claim as limitation. I am fascinated by the more enabling self-understanding. It has helped me to find my way out of the cloying comforts that are offered by prevalent psychological models.

I think people have some control over what they want; there's a relationship - maybe not automatic - between what you want and get.

You don't choose the times you live in, but you do choose who you want to be.

Do not accept any explanation of the world either through chance or determinism. You are not responsible for your belief. It is not even you who decides that you are not responsible - and so on to infinity. You are not obliged to believe. There is no point of departure.

You cannot be brave if you do not have a coward inside you.

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.

Act as if the future of the universe depends on what you do, while laughing at yourself for thinking that your actions make any difference.

Your life is inescapable. Unless you decide to escape it.