Top 450 Delia Owens Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “I hafta go, Kya. Can’t live here no longer.” She almost turned to him, but didn’t. Wanted to beg him not to leave her alone with Pa, but the words jammed up. “When you’re old enough you’ll understand,” he said. Kya wanted to holler out that she may be young, but she wasn’t stupid.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

154. “Walking into the shack – as she always called it – Tate felt the walls exhaling her breath, the floors whispering her steps so clear he called out her name. Then he stood against the wall, weeping. He lifted the old knapsack and held it to his chest.”

— Delia Owens

155. “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

156. “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

157. “Birds sing mostly at dawn because the cool, moist air of morning carries their songs and their meanings much farther.”

— Delia Owens

158. “Colors, which had been muted by the dimness, formed into shapes as they moved into the light. Golden hair beneath a red cap. As if coming in from a dream, Tate stood in the stern of his old fishing boat poling through the channel. Kya cut her engine and rowed backward into a thicket to watch him pass.”

— Delia Owens

159. “Chase stood a little distance away, watching as Kya disappeared into the spiraling birds. He hadn’t planned on feeling anything for this strange and feral barefoot girl, but watching her swirl across the sand, birds at her fingertips, he was intrigued by her self-reliance as well as her beauty. He’d never known anyone like Kya; a curiosity as well as desire stirred in him.”

— Delia Owens

160. “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

161. “The view a chick gets, she reckoned, when it finally breaks its shell.”

— Delia Owens

162. “Kya looked at her toes. Why should the injured, the still bleeding, bear the onus of forgiveness? She didn’t answer.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Delia Owens

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

176. “Some of the seeds lie dormant in the desiccated earth for decades, waiting, and when the water finally comes home again, they burst through the sol, unfolding their faces. Wonders and real-life knowledge she would’ve never learned in school. Truths everyone should know, yet somehow, even though they lay exposed all around, seemed to lie in secret like the seeds.”

— Delia Owens

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Delia Owens

181. “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

182. “Ya lie down with dogs, ya get up with fleas.”

— Delia Owens

183. “At the chirp of a chipmunk she whirled around, listened keenly to the caws of crows – a language before words were, when communication was simple and clear.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

185. “As they moved closer, she flattened herself against the oak and peered around. Five girls and four boys, a bit older than she, maybe twelve. She recognized Chase Andrews throwing.”

— Delia Owens

186. “We seen Chase Andrews flat out in the swamp.”

— Delia Owens

187. “With the mussel money she bought matches, a candle, and grits. Kerosene and soap would have to wait for another croker full. It took all her might not to buy a Sugar Daddy instead of the candle.”

— Delia Owens

188. “I don’t know how to do life without grits.”

— Delia Owens

189. “All along You thought The fiery current Of your lover’s breast Pulled you to the deep. But it was my heart-tide Releasing you To float adrift With seaweed.”

— Delia Owens

190. “Here- instead of the estuaries and enormous sweeps of grass as in her marsh- clear water flowed as far as she could see through a bright and open cypress forest. Brilliant white herons and storks stood among the water lilies and floating plants so green they seemed to glow. Hunched up on cypress knees as large as easy chairs, they ate pimento-cheese sandwiches and potato chips, grinning as geese glided just below their toes.”

— Delia Owens

191. “As before, the shack stood unpainted on the outside, the weathered pine boards and tin roof rich in gray and rust colors, brushed by Spanish moss from the overhanging oak. Less rickety, but still woven into the weft of the marsh. Kya continued sleeping on the porch, except in the coldest of winter. But now she had a bed.”

— Delia Owens

192. “In a time I don’t remember – I already loved you.”

— Delia Owens

193. “The sky in a frumpy sweater of gray clouds.”

— Delia Owens

194. “The lonely became larger than she could hold. She wished for someone’s voice, presence, touch, but wished more to protect her heart.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

196. “When the carton was empty she didn’t think she could stand the pain, so afraid they would leave her like everybody else.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

198. “The sun, still shy and submissive to winter, peeped in now and then between days of mean wind and bitter rain. Then one afternoon, just like that, spring elbowed her way in for good. The day warmed, and the sky shone as if polished.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens