Top 450 Delia Owens Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “Being thrown behind bars with no bail made clear how alone she was. The sheriff’s offer of a phone call starkly reminded her: there was no one to call. The only phone number she knew in the world was Jodie’s, and how could she call her brother and say she was in jail accused of murder? After all those years, how could she bother him with her troubles? And maybe shame played a part.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

204. “Pa was throwing Ma’s paintings, dresses, and books onto the flames.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

206. “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

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

— Delia Owens

208. “Inside the Piggly Wiggly, Kya studied the selection of grits and chose a one-pound bag of coarse ground yellow because a red tag hung from the top – a special of the week. Like Ma taught her.”

— Delia Owens

209. “You probably don’t remember, but after she walked away, you told me that a she-fox will sometimes leave her kits if she’s starving or under some other extreme stress.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

211. “Then, the hustle of getting everybody up and fed. Pa not there. He had two settings: silence and shouting. So it was just fine when he slept through, or didn’t come home at all.”

— Delia Owens

212. “Carrying one of the six copies of her new book the publishers had given her, she waited on the old reading-log. In about twenty minutes she heard the sound of Tate’s old boat chugging up the channel and stood. As he eased into view from the undergrowth, they waved and smiled softly. Both guarded. The last time he’d pulled in here, she’d hurled rocks in his face.”

— Delia Owens

213. “Eu me importei... Disse tudo que pensava com as palavras mais suaves que sabia. E agora... devo dizer que estou feliz porque acabou...”

— Delia Owens

214. “A deep pause in a lifetime of longing.”

— Delia Owens

215. “The sun, still shy and submissive to winter, peeped in now and then between days of mean wind and bitter rain.”

— Delia Owens

216. “Kya had done the laundry plenty with Ma, so knew how to scrub clothes on the rub board under the yard spigot with bars of lye soap. Pa’s overalls were so heavy wet she couldn’t wring them out with her tiny hands, and couldn’t reach the line to hang them, so draped them sopping over the palmetto fronds at the edge of the woods.”

— Delia Owens

217. “You can’t get hurt when you love someone from the other side of an estuary. All the years she rejected him, she survived because he was somewhere in the marsh, waiting. But now perhaps he would no longer be there.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

219. “Tate said long words were simply little ones strung together – so she wasn’t afraid of them, went straight to learning Pleistocene along with sat.”

— Delia Owens

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Delia Owens

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

227. “The next week she bought backbones – marked with a red tag – and boiled them with grits and collard greens in a mush that tasted fine.”

— Delia Owens

228. “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

229. “Seaweed 1967 Through the winter, Chase came to Kya’s shack often, usually spending one night each weekend.”

— Delia Owens

230. “Suddenly she shrieks as the power rushes beneath her, fondles her thighs, between her legs, flows along her back, swirling under her head, pulling her hair in inky strands.”

— Delia Owens

231. “She wished for someone’s voice, presence, touch, but wished more to protect her heart.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

233. “And just at that second, the wind picked up, and thousands upon thousands of yellow sycamore leaves broke from their life support and streamed across the sky. Autumn leaves don’t fall; they fly. They take their time and wander on this, their only chance to soar.”

— Delia Owens

234. “Tate. The golden-haired boy in the boat, guiding her home before a storm, gifting her feathers on a weathered stump, teaching her to read; the teenager steering her through her first cycle as a woman and arousing her first sexual desires as a female; the young scientist encouraging her to publish her books.”

— Delia Owens

235. “Jodie felt the lonely life hanging in her kitchen. It was there in the tiny supply of onions in the vegetable basket, the single plate drying in the rack, the cornbread wrapped carefully in a tea towel, the way an old widow might do it.”

— Delia Owens

236. “Once again Tate was nudging her to care for herself, not just offering to care for her. It seemed that all her life, he had been there. Then gone.”

— Delia Owens

237. “Maria begged him to stop drinking, to show enthusiasm for his job so that her father would promote him. But the babies started coming and the drinking never stopped.”

— Delia Owens

238. “Kya sprinted to the spot she knew would bare the road; surely Ma would wave from there, but she arrived only in time to glimpse the blue case – the color so wrong for the woods – as it disappeared. A heaviness, thick as black-cotton mud, pushed her chest as she returned to the steps to wait.”

— Delia Owens

239. “Earlier than usual, she got up the next morning when the tide was low, pulled on her overalls, and slipped out with a bucket, claw knife, and empty tow bags. Squatting in mud, she collected mussels along the sloughs like Ma had taught her, and in four hours of crouching and kneeling had two croker sacks full.”

— Delia Owens

240. “They sipped until the sun, as golden as syrupy as the bourbon, slipped into the sea.”

— Delia Owens

241. “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

242. “Dreams of escape – even through death – always lift toward the light. The dangling, shiny prize of peace just out of grasp until finally her body descends to the bottom and settles in murky quiet. Safe.”

— Delia Owens

243. “After Ma left, over the next few weeks, Kya’s oldest brother and two sisters drifted away too, as if by example. They had endured Pa’s red-faced rages, which started as shouts, then escalated into fist-slugs, or backhanded punches, until one by one, they disappeared.”

— Delia Owens

244. “He showed her more slides. She whispered, “It’s like never having seen the stars, then suddenly seeing them.”

— Delia Owens

245. “Her pocket brought a tail feather from an.”

— Delia Owens

246. “A areia guarda segredos melhor do que a lama.”

— Delia Owens

247. “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

248. “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

249. “Kya, it’s gotten cooler, don’t you want a jacket or something?” “No. I’m fine.” “Here, at least take my cap,” and he tossed a red ski cap toward her. She caught it and slung it back to him. He threw it again, farther, and she jogged across the sandbar, leaned low and scooped it up.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens