Top 450 Delia Owens Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Standing in the most fragile place of her life, she turned to the only net she knew – herself.”

— Delia Owens

202. “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

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

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

208. “A Boat and a Boy 1952.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

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

— Delia Owens

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

224. “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

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

— Delia Owens

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “A Visit from Patti Love 1969.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

232. “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

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

— Delia Owens

234. “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

235. “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

236. “Most people don’t have to be acquitted of murder to be accepted.”

— Delia Owens

237. “There in the first row of seats in the court room, sitting with Tate, were Jumpin’ and Mabel. Folks had made a stir when they walked in with Tate and sat downstairs in the “white area.” But when the bailiff reported this to Judge Sims, still in his chambers, the judge told him to announce that anybody of any color or creed could sit anywhere they wanted in his courtroom, and if somebody didn’t like it, they were free to leave. In fact, he’d make sure they did.”

— Delia Owens

238. “Out here, in the real remote, she was free to wander, collect at will, read the words, read the wild. Not waiting for the sounds of someone was a release. And a strength.”

— Delia Owens

239. “Lui aveva ancora gli stessi occhi; le facce cambiano, con gli eventi della vita, ma gli occhi rimangono una finestra sul passato...”

— Delia Owens

240. “I can live with that.” Each morning they rose at dawn and, while Tate percolated coffee, Kya fried corn fritters in Ma’s old iron skillet – blackened and dented – or stirred grits and eggs as sunrise eased over the lagoon. The heron posing one-legged in the mist. They cruised estuaries, waded waterways, and slipped through narrow streams, collecting feathers and amoebas. In the evenings, they drifted in her old boat until sunset, then swam naked in moonlight or loved in beds of cool ferns.”

— Delia Owens

241. “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

242. “Thought ya could use that fer yo’ feathers, bird nests, and all that other stuff ya c’lect.”

— Delia Owens

243. “Now, Miss Kya, this ain’t nothin’ to be ‘shamed of. It ain’t no curse, like folks say; this here’s the startin’ of all life, and only a woman can do it.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

245. “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

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

— Delia Owens

247. “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

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

— Delia Owens

249. “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

250. “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