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My Year of Rest and Relaxation QUOTES

My Year of Rest and Relaxation QUOTES

1 " But I was still anxious. Trevor Trevor Trevor. I might have felt better if he were dead, I thought, since behind every memory of him was the possibility of reconciling, and thus more heartbreak and indignity. I felt weak. My nerves were frayed and fragile, like tattered silk. Sleep had not yet solved my crankiness, my impatience, my memory. It seemed like everything was now somehow linked to getting back what I'd lost. I could picture my selfhood, my past, my psyche like a dump truck filled with trash. Sleep was the hydraulic piston that lifted the bed of the truck up, ready to dump everything out somewhere, but Trevor was stuck in the tailgate, blocking the flow of garbage. I was afraid things would be like that forever. "

― Ottessa Moshfegh , My Year of Rest and Relaxation

2 " My first impression of him was that he was free spirited, clever, funny. That proved to be completely inaccurate. "

― Ottessa Moshfegh , My Year of Rest and Relaxation

3 " Oh, shut up, Reva."

"I love you."

Maybe she did, and that's why I hated her. "

― Ottessa Moshfegh , My Year of Rest and Relaxation

4 " I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it. "

― Ottessa Moshfegh , My Year of Rest and Relaxation

5 " For a moment I felt joyful, and then I felt completely exhausted. "

― Ottessa Moshfegh , My Year of Rest and Relaxation

6 " Reva often spoke about 'settling down.' That sounded like death to me.

'I'd rather be alone than anybody's live-in prostitute,' I said to Reva. "

― Ottessa Moshfegh , My Year of Rest and Relaxation

7 " We probably shouldn't be friends," I told her, stretching out on the sofa. "I've been thinking about it, and I see no reason to continue. "

― Ottessa Moshfegh , My Year of Rest and Relaxation

8 " At work, I took hour-long naps in the supply closet under the stairs during my lunch breaks. "

― Ottessa Moshfegh , My Year of Rest and Relaxation

9 " …every time I lay down in that supply closet I went straight into black emptiness, an infinite space of nothingness. I was neither scared nor elated in that space. I had no visions. I had no ideas. If I had a distinct thought, I would hear it, and the sound of it would echo and echo until it got absorbed by the darkness and disappeared. There was no response necessary. No inane conversation with myself. It was peaceful. "

― Ottessa Moshfegh , My Year of Rest and Relaxation

10 " I wasn't an insomniac, but I was miserable. "

― Ottessa Moshfegh , My Year of Rest and Relaxation

11 " I needed a way out of this—the bathroom, the pills, the sleeplessness, the failed, stupid life. "

― Ottessa Moshfegh , My Year of Rest and Relaxation

12 " Would she suddenly grow into maturity and discard me as a relic from a failed past, the way I'd hoped to do to her when my year of sleep was over? "

― Ottessa Moshfegh , My Year of Rest and Relaxation

13 " I went home and went to sleep. Outside of the occasional irritation, I had no nightmares, no passions, no desires, no great pains. "

― Ottessa Moshfegh , My Year of Rest and Relaxation

14 " My favorite days were the ones that barely registered. I'd catch myself not breathing, slumped on the sofa, staring at an eddy of dust tumbling across the hardwood floor in the draft, and I'd remember that I was alive for a second, then fade back out. "

― Ottessa Moshfegh , My Year of Rest and Relaxation

15 " I wasn't entirely awake, but I couldn't cross the line into sleep. 'Go. Go on. The abyss is right there. Just a few more steps.' But I was too tired to break through the glass. "

― Ottessa Moshfegh , My Year of Rest and Relaxation

16 " But there I was, approaching the depths of my journey. So far, I thought, I’d been wandering through the forest. But now I was approaching the mouth of the cave. I smelled the smoke of a fire burning deep inside. Something had to be burned and sacrificed. And then the fire would burn out and die. The smoke would clear. My eyes would adjust to the darkness, I thought. I’d find my footing. When I came out of the cave, back out into the light, when I woke up at last, everything—the whole world—would be new again. "

― Ottessa Moshfegh , My Year of Rest and Relaxation

17 " I found my way into the Met one afternoon in early September. I guess I wanted to see what other people had done with their lives, people who had made art alone, who had stared long and hard at bowls of fruit. "

― Ottessa Moshfegh , My Year of Rest and Relaxation

18 " I reached for her hand and held it. It was bold of me to make such a move, but I thought we might bond now that we had something so huge in common -- a dead man whose last name we shared. "

― Ottessa Moshfegh , My Year of Rest and Relaxation

19 " Forget Trevor," Reva said. "You'll meet someone better, if you ever leave your apartment." She sipped and poured and went on about how "it's all about your attitude," and that "positive thinking is more powerful than negative thinking, even in equal amounts." She'd recently read a book called How to Attract the Man of Your Dreams Using Self-hypnosis, and so she went on to explain to me the difference between "wish fulfillment" and "manifesting your own reality." I tried not to listen. "Your problem is that you're passive. You wait around for things to change, and they never will. That must be a painful way to live. Very disempowering," she said, and burped.

I had taken some Risperdal. I was feeling woozy.

"Have you ever heard the expression 'eat shit or die'?" I asked.

Reva unscrewed the tequila and poured more into her can. "It's 'eat shit and die," she said. "

― Ottessa Moshfegh , My Year of Rest and Relaxation

20 " I should have felt something—a pang of sadness, a twinge of nostalgia. I did feel a peculiar sensation, like oceanic despair that—if I were in a movie—would be depicted superficially as me shaking my head slowly and shedding a tear. Zoom in on my sad, pretty, orphan face. Smash cut to a montage of my life's most meaningful moments: my first steps; Dad pushing me on a swing at sunset; Mom bathing me in the tub; grainy, swirling home video of my sixth birthday in the backyard garden, me blindfolded and twirling to pin the tail on the donkey. But the nostalgia didn't hit. These weren't my memories. I just felt a tingling in my hands, an eerie tingle, like when you nearly drop something precious off a balcony, but don't. My heart bumped up a little. I could drop it, I told myself—the house, this feeling. I had nothing left to lose. "

― Ottessa Moshfegh , My Year of Rest and Relaxation