Top 450 Delia Owens Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Jumpin’, you know how it is. They’ll take his side. They’ll say I’m just stirring up trouble.”

— Delia Owens

152. “He was a page of time, a clipping pasted in a scrapbook because it was all she had. Her heart pounded as the fury dissipated.”

— Delia Owens

153. “Slowly, she unraveled each word of the sentence: “‘There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.’” “Oh,” she said. “Oh.” “You can read, Kya. There will never be a time again when you can’t read.” “It ain’t just that.” She spoke almost in a whisper. “I wadn’t aware that words could hold so much. I didn’t know a sentence could be so full.” He smiled. “That’s a very good sentence. Not all words hold that much.”

— Delia Owens

154. “When cornered, desperate, or isolated, man reverts to those instincts that aim straight at survival. Quick and just.”

— Delia Owens

155. “A surplus. Her heart filled up. The same feeling as having a full tank of gas or seeing the sunset under a paint-brushed sky.”

— Delia Owens

156. “Some parts of us will always be what we were, what we had to be to survive...”

— Delia Owens

157. “No longer did she daydream of winging with eagles; perhaps when you have to paw your supper from mud, imagination flattens to that of adulthood.”

— Delia Owens

158. “He didn’t mention how he felt sorry for her being alone, that he knew how the kids had treated her for years;.”

— Delia Owens

159. “She knew the years of isolation had altered her behavior until she was different from others, but it wasn’t her fault she’d been alone.”

— Delia Owens

160. “Op een andere plek, in een andere tijd, hadden een oude zwarte man en een jonge blanke vrouw elkaar kunnen omhelzen, maar niet daar, niet toen.”

— Delia Owens

161. “Those looking for serious land moved on, and this infamous marsh became a net, scooping up a mishmash of mutinous sailors, castaways, debtors, and fugitives dodging wars, taxes, or laws that they didn’t take to.”

— Delia Owens

162. “Months turned into a year. The lonely became larger than she could hold. She wished for someone’s voice, presence, touch, but wished more to protect her heart. Months passed into another year. Then another.”

— Delia Owens

163. “Among themselves, doves fight as often as hawks.”

— Delia Owens

164. “His desire to protect her was as strong as the other. Sometimes.”

— Delia Owens

165. “For the first time since Ma and Jodie left, she breathed without pain; felt something other than the hurt. She needed this boat and that boy.”

— Delia Owens

166. “But when he reached the lagoon, he stopped under the deep canopy and watched hundreds of fireflies beckoning far into the dark reaches of the marsh. Way out yonder, where the crawdads sing.”

— Delia Owens

167. “Part of her longed to touch his hand, a strange wanting, but her fingers wouldn’t do it. Instead she memorized the bluish veins on the inside of his wrist, as intricate as those sketched on the wings of wasps.”

— Delia Owens

168. “There are sounds, of course, but compared to the marsh, the swamp is quiet because decomposition is cellular work.”

— Delia Owens

169. “When they finally broke into the lagoon, where the ratty shack with rusted-out screens hunkered under the oaks, Maria clutched her youngest child, Jodie, fighting tears. Pa assured her, “Don’t ya worry none. I’ll get this fixed up in no time.” But Jake never improved the shack or finished high school. Soon after they arrived, he took up drinking and poker at the Swamp Guinea, trying to leave that foxhole in a shot glass.”

— Delia Owens

170. “In another time and place, an old black man and a young white woman might have hugged. But not there, not then.”

— Delia Owens

171. “Ma was isolated and alone. Under those circumstances people behave differently.”

— Delia Owens

172. “I made a necklace with the shell you found. You don’t have to wear it if you don’t want to.”

— Delia Owens

173. “Female fireflies draw in strange males with dishonest signals and eat them; mantis females devour their own mates.”

— Delia Owens

174. “The rest of the small half-moon beach was covered in a thick layer of broken shells, a jumble of crustacean parts, and crab claws. Shells the best secret-keepers of all.”

— Delia Owens

175. “Not waiting for the sounds of someone was a release. And a strength.”

— Delia Owens

176. “Truths everyone should know, yet somehow, even though they lay exposed all around, seemed to lie in secret like the seeds.”

— Delia Owens

177. “Kya stood and walked into the night, into the creamy light of a three-quarter moon. The marsh’s soft air fell silklike around her shoulders. The moonlight chose an unexpected path through the pines, laying shadows about in rhymes. She strolled like a sleepwalker as the moon pulled herself naked from the waters and climbed limb by limb through the oaks.”

— Delia Owens

178. “Kya, I want you more than anything. I want you forever. But you’re too young. You’re only fifteen.”

— Delia Owens

179. “Drifting back to the predictable cycles of tadpoles and the ballet of fireflies, Kya burrowed deeper into the wordless wilderness. Nature seemed the only stone that would not slip midstream.”

— Delia Owens

180. “Ever so carefully he opened the old cigar box, the one where all the collecting began. The box still smelled of sweet tobacco and little girl. Among a few birds’ feathers, insects’ wings, and seeds was the small jar with the ashes from her ma’s letter, and a bottle of Revlon fingernail polish, Barely Pink. The bits and bones of a life. The stones of her stream.”

— Delia Owens

181. “Just as she had figured out most things, Kya figured out how to become a woman on her own.”

— Delia Owens

182. “Well, we better hide way out there where the crawdads sing. I pity any foster parents who take you on.” Tate’s whole face smiled.”

— Delia Owens

183. “Most of what she knew, she’d learned from the wild. Nature had nurtured, tutored, and protected her when no one else would.”

— Delia Owens

184. “Just like their whiskey, the marsh dwellers bootlegged their own laws – not like those burned onto stone tablets or inscribed on documents, but deeper ones, stamped in their genes.”

— Delia Owens

185. “Their squeals made Kya’s silence even louder. Their togetherness tugged at her loneliness, but she knew being labeled as marsh trash kept her behind the oak tree.”

— Delia Owens

186. “Life had made her an expert at mashing feelings into a storable size.”

— Delia Owens

187. “Mad as a mule chewin’ bumblebees.”

— Delia Owens

188. “Kya knew from reading Albert Einstein’s books that time is no more fixed than the stars. Time speeds and bends around planets and suns, is different in the mountains than in the valleys, and is part of the same fabric as space, which curves and swells as does the sea. Objects, whether planets or apples, fall or orbit, not because of a gravitational energy, but because they plummet into the silky folds of spacetime – like into the ripples on a pond, created by those of higher mass.”

— Delia Owens

189. “For miles To the other edge, And how much sky Is in one breath When time slides backward From the sand.”

— Delia Owens

190. “His soft words, sounding almost like poetry, taught her that soil is packed with life and one of the most precious riches on Earth; that draining wetlands dries the land for miles beyond, killing plants and animals along with the water.”

— Delia Owens

191. “The Barkley Cove graveyard trailed off under tunnels of dark oaks. Spanish moss hung in long curtains, creating cavelike sanctuaries for old tombstones – the remains of a family here, a loner there, in no order at all. Fingers of gnarled roots had torn and twisted gravestones into hunched and nameless forms. Markers of death all weathered into nubbins by elements of life. In the distance, the sea and sky sang too bright for this serious ground.”

— Delia Owens

192. “But I knew this. I’ve known a long time that people don’t stay.”

— Delia Owens

193. “A clutch of women’s the most tender, most tough place on Earth.”

— Delia Owens

194. “Pa still disappeared some, not coming back for several days, but not as often as before. And when he did show up, he didn’t collapse in a stupor but ate a meal and talked some. One night they played gin rummy, he guffawing when she won, and she giggling with her hands over her mouth like a regular girl.”

— Delia Owens

195. “Look here, Miss Kya,” Mabel said, as she lifted a peach-colored dress with a layer of chiffon over the flowered skirt, the most beautiful piece of clothing Kya had ever seen, prettier than Ma’s sundress. “This dress is fit for a princess like you.”

— Delia Owens

196. “He turned to her, still standing in the doorway. “Kya, these are wonderful, beautifully detailed. You could publish these. This could be a book – lots of books.”

— Delia Owens

197. “When her lagoon opened before them, the delicate details of every mossy branch and brilliant leaf reflected in the clear dark water. Dragonflies and snowy egrets lifted briefly at his strange boat, then resettled gracefully on silent wings.”

— Delia Owens

198. “Even Jodie had said she should give Tate another chance. But every time she thought of him or saw him, her heart jumped from the old love to the pain of abandonment. She wished it would settle on one side or the other.”

— Delia Owens

199. “Kya was bonded to her planet and its life in a way few people are. Rooted solid in this earth. Born of this mother.”

— Delia Owens

200. “Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.”

— Delia Owens