Top 450 Delia Owens Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Unworthy boys make a lot of noise.”

— Delia Owens

152. “Kya watched others. The females got what they wanted – first a mate, then a meal – just by changing their signals. Kya knew judgment had no place here. Evil was not in play, just life pulsing on, even at the expense of some of the players. Biology sees right and wrong as the same color in different light.”

— Delia Owens

153. “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

154. “Trees so bent they wore the shape of the wind.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

157. “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

158. “If only you could, some way, forgive me.” He breathed in and waited. Kya looked at her toes. Why should the injured, the still bleeding, bear the onus of forgiveness? She didn’t answer.”

— Delia Owens

159. “Someone knew her name. She was taken aback. Felt anchored to something; released from something else.”

— Delia Owens

160. “Within all the worlds of biology, she searched for an explanation of why a mother would leave her offspring.”

— Delia Owens

161. “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

162. “Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

164. “She hesitated; touching someone meant giving part of herself away, a piece she never got back.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

166. “Don’t go thinking poetry’s just for sissies. There’s mushy love poems, for sure, but there’s also funny ones, lots about nature, war even. Whole point of it – they make ya feel something.” His dad had told him many times that the definition of a real man is one who cries without shame, reads poetry with his heart, feels opera in his soul, and does what’s necessary to defend a woman.”

— Delia Owens

167. “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

168. “It’s been a soul-crushing ordeal, but this seems to be a chance to start over.”

— Delia Owens

169. “The elements had created a brief and shifting smile of sand, angled just so. The next tide, the next current would design another sandbar, and another, but never this one. Not the one who caught her. The one who told her a thing or two.”

— Delia Owens

170. “Never said I could be completely sure it was her. But I’m pretty – ” “That will be all, Mr. Miller. Thank you.” Judge Sims asked, “Redirect, Eric?” From his seat, Eric asked, “Hal, you testified that.”

— Delia Owens

171. “Now she looked into the eyes of the stranger standing on her porch and said, “Jodie.”

— Delia Owens

172. “While she pleaded for him not to cut through her name, he sliced enormous pieces of cake and plopped them on paper plates. Staring into each other’s eyes, they broke off bites and stuffed them in their mouths. Smacking loudly. Licking fingers. Laughing through icing-smeared grins. Eating cake the way it should be eaten, the way everybody wants to eat it.”

— Delia Owens

173. “When they finally settled at the table, she pulled her chair close to his, their arms and elbows nearly touching. Just to feel him near.”

— Delia Owens

174. “If somebody took the necklace off Chase at the tower, that would at least put them at the scene, and I can see somebody from the marsh being involved in this thing. They got their own laws. But I just don’t know if a woman could’ve pushed a big guy like Chase through that hole.”

— Delia Owens

175. “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

176. “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

177. “Autumn was coming. the evergreens might not have noticed, but the Sycamores did: they waved thousands of yellow leaves...”

— Delia Owens

178. “The war with Germany was an equalizer. Boiled down to the same uniform-hue as everyone else, he could hide his shame, once again play proud.”

— Delia Owens

179. “The bits and bones of a life. The stones of her stream.”

— Delia Owens

180. “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

181. “Female insects, Kya thought, know how to deal with their lovers.”

— Delia Owens

182. “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

183. “Standing in the most fragile place of her life, she turned to the only net she knew – herself.”

— Delia Owens

184. “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

185. “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

186. “The only light emitted from various flashing beer signs, giving off an amber glow, like campfires licking whiskered faces.”

— Delia Owens

187. “Oh, that’s a long boring story.”

— Delia Owens

188. “Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand.”

— Delia Owens

189. “It is not a morality, but simple math. Among themselves, doves fight as often as hawks.”

— Delia Owens

190. “Months passed into another year. Then another.”

— Delia Owens

191. “A Boat and a Boy 1952.”

— Delia Owens

192. “The unworthy ones strut about, pulling you in with falsehoods. Which is probably why Ma fell for a man like Pa.”

— Delia Owens

193. “Kya touched the words as if they were a message, as though Ma had underlined them specifically so her daughter would read them someday by this dim kerosene flame and understand. It wasn’t much, not a handwritten note tucked in the back of a sock drawer, but it was something. She sensed that the words clinched a powerful meaning, but she couldn’t shake it free. If she ever became a poet, she’d make the message clear.”

— Delia Owens

194. “I’m so sorry. I am, but, Kya, it’s not just guys who are unfaithful. I’ve been duped, dropped, run over a few times myself. Let’s face it, a lot of times love doesn’t work out. Yet even when it fails, it connects you to others and, in the end, that is all you have, the connections. Look at us; you and I have each other now, and just think, if I have kids and you have kids, well, that’s a whole new string of connections. And on it goes. Kya, if you love Tate, take a chance.”

— Delia Owens

195. “Nature is audacious enough to ensure that the males who send out dishonest signals or go from one female to the next almost always end up alone.”

— Delia Owens

196. “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

197. “Dully she watched fireflies scribbling across the night. She never collected lightning bugs in bottles; you learn a lot more about something when it’s not in a jar.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

199. “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

200. “Kya, I’m sorry ’bout the other day. Okay? C’mon, I wanta show you the fire tower.” She said nothing, still drifting his way, knowing it was weakness. “Look, if you’ve never climbed the tower, it’s a great way to see the marsh. Follow me.”

— Delia Owens