Top 450 Delia Owens Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Female fireflies draw in strange males with dishonest signals and eat them; mantis females devour their own mates.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

204. “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

205. “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

206. “Hello, Mister Jake. How ya doin’?” “Well, Ah woke up on the right side of dirt,” Pa answered. Jumpin’ laughed as if he’d never heard the worn-out phrase.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

208. “Gently she touched his head, then scratched his neck. A loud purr erupted like a current. She closed her eyes at such easy acceptance. A deep pause in a lifetime of longing.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Delia Owens

217. “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

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

— Delia Owens

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Delia Owens

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Delia Owens

229. “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

230. “Jodie, the brother closest to Kya, but still seven years older, stepped from the house and stood behind her. He had her same dark eyes and black.”

— Delia Owens

231. “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

232. “Ma had said women need one another more than they need men.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

238. “Kya didn’t stop or they would bolt, a lesson she’d learned from watching wild turkeys: if you act like a predator, they act like prey. Just ignore them, keep going slowly.”

— Delia Owens

239. “When they hit the shadows, they vanished. Without the sun they were nothing.”

— Delia Owens

240. “A Boat and a Boy 1952.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

242. “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

243. “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

244. “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

245. “Just forget it. No god’s gonna come to this garden.”

— Delia Owens

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “Finally, after a lifetime, she admitted it was the chance of seeing Tate, the hope of rounding a creek bend and watching him through reeds, that had pulled her into the marsh every day of her life since she was seven.”

— Delia Owens

250. “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