Death in Her Hands Quotes

“There is nothing more heartbreaking than a squandered opportunity, a missed chance. I knew about stuff like that. I'd been young once. So many dreams had been dashed. But I dashed them myself. I wanted to be safe, whole, have a future of certainty. One makes mistakes when there is confusion between having a future at all and having the future one wants.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“I felt I needed to hide a little. My mind needed a smaller world to roam.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“How did people go on with their lives as though death weren't all around them?”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“Life was persistent. There it was, every day. Each morning it woke me up. It was loud and brash. A bully. A lounge singer in a garish sequin dress. A runaway truck. A jackhammer. A brush fire. A canker sore. Death was different. It was tender, a mystery.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“It’s either this or that. Decide and move forward. You spend so much time playing in your mind, like a sandbox. Everything just slipping through your fingers, nothing solid to hold.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“Walter and I had shared a mind, of course. Couples get that way. I think it has something to do with sharing a bed. The mind, untethered during sleep, travels up and away, dancing, sometimes in partners. Things pass back and forth in dreams.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“The slightest thing delighted him. I wished I could be more like that, and tried to promise myself I’d work harder to be happier.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“It was comforting to have an animal, so consistently near and needy, to focus on, to nurture. Just to have another heart beating in the room, a live energy, had cheered me. I hadn’t realized how lonely I’d been, and then suddenly I wasn’t alone at all. I had a dog. Never again would I be alone, I thought. What a gift to have such a companion, like a child and protector, both, something wiser than me in so many ways, and yet doting, loyal, and affectionate.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“Things might be theoretical, that was true. I may be imagining it all, but it still hurt. It was still sad to lose someone you loved.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“And how nice it was to know that one could forget such things. We are resilient. We suffer, heal, and proceed.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“A little lying never hurt anybody. It kept the bounds of what one person was distinct from what another person was.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“Sometimes I felt that my mind was just a soft cloud of air around me, taking in whatever flew in, spinning it around, and then delivering it back out into the ether.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“I'd never been jealous of any young woman's looks. For me, it was like seeing a cute little squirrel. This one has big eyes, that one has a charming stripe, et cetera. But some women really take offense at youth and beauty.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“That was how life seemed to be finding things to do to pass the time. The less I'd looked at the clock, the better I knew I'd enjoyed my day.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“And then I thought of my loneliness, my approaching death, how nobody knew me, how nobody cared. I thought of my parents, long dead, and how little love they'd given me. I thought of Walter, of his nauseatingly gentle caresses. Even when he meant to be tender, he was condescending and controlling. I'd never been loved properly. Nobody had ever said, "You are wonderful, even your bitterness and neurotic energy are wonderful. Even your suspiciousness, your rigidity, your graying, thinning, hair, your wrinkled thighs?" I'd been young and beautiful once, and even then nobody had kissed me and said, "How young and beautiful you are”, not unless they wanted something from me. And that was Walter. Always wanting something, some permission to be boastful, some permission to have power. I cried and cried, thinking of the love I could have had, had I never met that awful, deleterious, pompous man. I let tears drip from my eyes, my head bent toward the gravel, and as they splatted they made a little trail behind me. Maybe Charlie would pass by later and follow the trail. Poor Charlie. He was the only one on Earth who loved me, and even he had left. My head began to throb. I got dizzy again.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“You spend so much time playing in your mind, like a sandbox. Everything just slipping through your fingers, nothing solid to hold.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“Yes, yes, be alive, make your mess, but when you die, leave not a trace. Sweep up any evidence of your existence. Reminders will only trouble those who live on. They'll have to waste their own lives cleaning up yours.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“I closed my eyes. I could go anywhere with my eyes closed to the moon if I wanted, listen to the deafening echo of silence as it spun through space. That is the sound of silence, isn't it? The sound of death? The sound of nonexistence? The friction of not being? Everyone on Earth had heard of death, from time to time. How many have fallen there! Others had lived and died before me.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“Suspicion invites danger, doesn't it? Keep the imagination soft and happy, and only good things will come.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“But people lied all the time. It was a part of what kept us whole as individuals. A little lying never hurt anybody. It kept the bounds of what one person was distinct from what another person was.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“I could see they were connected to something that had immense power over them. This was what happened when the mindspace was the internet, I thought. One loses one's sense of self. One's mind can go anywhere. And at the same time, the mind becomes lame when it is connected to something so consuming.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“It was exciting to feel so much spite for somebody. It inspired me; I almost felt like dancing. If I was an artist, I thought, I would paint a huge black-and-red canvas, stabbing with my brush in a frenzy until I fell down on the floor in a heap, sweating and dizzy, the world spinning above me. I wished I could be breathless like that, and for so long I'd believed I couldn't.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“...he looked like he couldn’t kill a fly. Oh, but he could. He once beat a rat to death with a hammer.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“Brutes, those cops were, talking about me that way. Didn’t they know I’d been the wife of a scientist? Didn’t they know I’d worn the most elegant silk blend dresses, gone to dinners at the university? The wife of a state senator had complimented me on my hairdo. They’d printed my picture in the paper a few times. I’d sung in a chorus at college. I’d studied Japanese calligraphy. I once saved a kitten that had crawled up into the wheel well of an old man’s car. And what were those cops good for? Pulling people over for speeding? I pictured their mindspace crawling with headless rats, spewing blood, white flashing neck bones, severed heads gnawing at dead headless bodies. It made me sick to imagine their thoughts, those monsters.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“Whoever had written the note understood that be masking one's peculiarities, one invokes authority.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“An overconfident sleuth could misinterpret evidence. She might only see the clues that would lead her to the solution she’d first had in mind. And I wanted to be surprised by what I discovered.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“He liked to tell me that I was the source of my own misery, that I was choosing to believe that my life was limited, boring. He explained that everything was possible, and moreover, everything—every thing and scenario—existed in infinite versions throughout the galaxies and beyond. I knew it was a childish belief, but I had adopted it anyway. Imagining infinite realities made whatever nuisance I had to withstand more tolerable. I was more than myself.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“Walter had told me stories of the war, and they were worse than vampire books. They didn’t seem at all real either. It was dumb and cruel that anyone had to die at any moment they weren’t ready for, if they still felt there was more life to live.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“A handsome man must be terribly cruel to generate such discomfort in the people around him.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

“It was all nonsense, ,was it not? What was real was what was down here, on Earth. The world of nature and its miracles, that was God.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands