Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes

Enslavement is when one person completely controls another person, uses violence or violent threats to maintain that control, exploits them economically, and pays them effectively nothing. Trafficking in persons is a process of enslaving someone.

Thank you for your very detailed letter regarding Scientology. We haven't yet found a way to attack these jackals who feed on children and young adults who are too emotionally weak to stand by themselves when they reach the age of consent. It's too bad there isn't a 20th Century Charles Dickens to write about the terrible destruction of these 20th Century Fagins who make themselves rich while they destroy the psyche of so many.

The trouble with this wide-open pornography ... is not that it corrupts but that it desensitizes; not that it unleashes the passions but that it cripples the emotions; not that it encourages a mature attitude but that it is a reversion to infantile obsessions; not that it removes the blinders but that it distorts the view. Progress is proclaimed but love is denied. What we have is not liberation but dehumanization.

I don't need handcuffs to enslave a woman.

I guarantee that if you talk to some of the young ladies that are out on the street selling their bodies -if you sit them down and really talk to them - they'll tell you that they've been abused, physically and mentally. They go through this stage where they don't care, because you don't feel like you're worth anything.

The worst part about prostitution is that you're obliged not to sell sex only, but your humanity. That's the worst part of it: that what you're selling is your human dignity. Not really so much in bed, but in accepting the agreement - in becoming a bought person.

We were his disposable things. Brought to him like cattle. Stripped of what made us sisters or daughters or children. There was nothing that he could take from us—our genes, our bones, our wombs—that would ever satisfy him. There was no other way that we would be free.

I am concerned about the growing problem of sexual abuse and exploitation of our children.

It was my first big relationship and it was just very abusive. I wouldn't give him the credit of naming him, if he ever reads this. But he was older, in the music business - or so he said.

I had a husband who, I'm convinced, was an undiagnosed manic depressive. He didn't treat me as if I had a brain - I was just this beautiful little doll he could show off.

I'd always been treated like an object, not like a human.

I find it disturbing that men who are products of highly developed economies come to a developing nation solely to exploit their women and their children.

He was using me. When he cast me in Sideways I was nothing but a vessel.

In days gone by, short-statured people were not only labelled as ugly, stupid and freakish, they were often owned by aristocrats and treated, at best, as entertainment and, at worst, as pets.

I hate it when people use sex as a weapon against the people who are engaging in it. It's so hypocritical.

It has been our experience, that free men are often seduced by sinister practices, enslaved, and transported, which can thus be prevented

Torture was necessary to maintain slavery. It was integral to slavery. You cannot have slavery without some torture or the threat of torture; and you cannot have torture without slavery. You cannot imprison a free man forever unless you have broken him; and you can only forcibly break a man's soul by torturing it out of him. Slavery dehumanizes; torture dehumanizes in exactly the same way. The torture of human beings who have no freedom and no recourse to the courts is slavery.

I was sent to a camp in Maryland for three weeks when I was nine years old, and that was my first training on how to sexually please men. I was through a training course, like a seminar…. I was taught to talk to older men and encouraged to become friendly with older men and eventually, when I was old enough, I was sent out into what they called the operational field, and I would be photographed [in sexually compromising scenes] with [foreign] government and agency officials

It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY.

When someone else is making money off of you and using your body, you need to step off the carousel.

I think if you're going to abuse someone, you really have to convince them of two things. First, you have to normalise what you're doing, convince them that it's not that bad. And the second thing is to convince them that they deserve it in some way.

The Southern newspapers, with their advertisements of negro sales and personal descriptions of fugitive slaves, supply details of misery that it would be difficult for imagination to exceed. Scorn, derision, insult, menace - the handcuff, the last - the tearing away of children from parents, of husbands from wives - the weary trudging in droves along the common highways, the labor of body, the despair of mind, the sickness of heart - these are the realities which belong to the system, and form the rule, rather that the exception, in the slave's experience.

We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.

Borat shows American stereotypes of Eastern Europe but it's an accurate depiction of what a certain type of American is. They think they can buy and sell these girls and then they get bought and sold.

Motherfucker. She leaves me no choice. Now I have to break her self-esteem, sleep with her and steal the shirt.