Death in Her Hands
Ottessa Moshfegh
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I felt I needed to hide a little. My mind needed a smaller world to roam.”
“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.”
“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.”
“How did people go on with their lives as though death weren't all around them?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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Book Keywords:
life, existential, death, dread, missed-opportunities
