Top 450 Delia Owens Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 7 of 10

301. “My name’s Tate ’case ya see me again.”

— Delia Owens

302. “Oddly, the sweet, freshly turned earth smelled more like a beginning than an end.”

— Delia Owens

303. “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

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

— Delia Owens

305. “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.”

— Delia Owens

306. “They stopped laughing. He took her shoulders, hesitated an instant, then kissed her lips, as the leaves rained and danced around them as silently as snow.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

308. “Tucked in the P section was a pelican feather, forget-me-not blossoms pressed between two pages of the Fs, a dried mushroom under M. So many treasures were stashed among the pages, the book would not completely close.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

310. “She knew Pa was the reason they all left; what she wondered was why no one took her with them. She’d thought of leaving too, but had nowhere to go and no bus money.”

— Delia Owens

311. “As they crowded around her, she felt their featers brushing her arms and thighs, and threw her head back, smiling with them. Even as tears streamed her cheeks.”

— Delia Owens

312. “If we had taken her in as one of our own – I think that is what she would be today.”

— Delia Owens

313. “Jim Bo Sweeny darted from flipping crab cakes on the griddle to stirring a pot of creamed corn on the burner to poking chicken thighs.”

— Delia Owens

314. “Kya never went back to school a day in her life.”

— Delia Owens

315. “IN EARLY SEPTEMBER of that fishing summer, on one afternoon that paled with heat, Kya walked to the mailbox at the end of the lane. Leafing through the grocery ads, she stopped dead when she saw a blue envelope addressed in Ma’s neat hand.”

— Delia Owens

316. “What he’d learned right after DNA, isotopes, and protozoans was that he couldn’t breathe without her.”

— Delia Owens

317. “That anticipation of touch.”

— Delia Owens

318. “The same game of physics playing on a different field of biology.”

— Delia Owens

319. “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

320. “The mussel money turned out to be more reliable than the Monday money ever had, and she usually managed to beat out other pickers.”

— Delia Owens

321. “Downstream a herd of five female deer ignored her and wandered along the water’s edge nibbling leaves. If only she could join in, belong to them. Kya knew it wasn’t so much that the herd would be incomplete without one of its deer, but that each deer would be incomplete without her herd. p272.”

— Delia Owens

322. “Listless, she wondered what she had done to send everyone away.”

— Delia Owens

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “Nature had nurtured, tutored, and protected her when no one else would.”

— Delia Owens

327. “Nodding at everyone, there not being one person they didn’t know, they sat at a corner table. Both ordered the special: chicken-fried steak, mash and gravy, turnips, and coleslaw. Biscuits. Pecan pie with ice cream. At the next table, a family of four joined hands and lowered their heads as the father said a blessing out loud. At “Amen” they kissed the air, squeezed hands, and passed the cornbread.”

— Delia Owens

328. “She got by with her supplies from Jumpin’s and had more mussels than she could eat. They weren’t that bad tossed into the grits, mashed up beyond recognition. They didn’t have eyes to look at her like the fish did.”

— Delia Owens

329. “Sloppy and confused waves jerked the bow sideways, pulling against the tiller. As always, the ocean seemed angrier than the marsh. Deeper, it had more to say.”

— Delia Owens

330. “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

331. “But this was too abrupt – picnic, then mate the.”

— Delia Owens

332. “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

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

— Delia Owens

334. “The calmness of the boy. She’d never known anybody to speak or move so steady. So sure and easy. Just being near him, and not even that close, had eased her tightness. 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

335. “Finally, she bent over and, heaving, fell to her knees. Cussing worn-out words. As long as she ranted, sobs couldn’t surface. But nothing could stop the burning shame and sharp sadness. A simple hope of being with someone, of actually being wanted, of being touched, had drawn her in. But these hurried groping hands were only a taking, not a sharing or giving.”

— Delia Owens

336. “Her pockets yielded only ordinary feathers, shells, and seedpods, so she hurried back to the shack and stood in front of her feather-wall, window-shopping. The most graceful were the tail feathers from a tundra swan.”

— Delia Owens

337. “There’s a mama blue jay lifting from a branch; I’d fly too, if I had a chance.”

— Delia Owens

338. “Boys, not men. She sat straight up. There was no back door.”

— Delia Owens

339. “Months passed, winter easing gently into place, as southern winters do.”

— Delia Owens

340. “But now, with permission finally granted, an urgency gripped him and he seemed to bypass her needs and push his way. She cried out against a sharp tearing, thinking something was wrong.”

— Delia Owens

341. “Talking out loud, head low, he asked his dad to forgive him for spending so much time away, and he knew Scupper did. Tate remembered his dad’s definition of a man: one who can cry freely, feel poetry and opera in his heart, and do whatever it takes to defend a woman. Scupper would have understood tracking love through mud. Tate sat there quite awhile, one hand on his mother, the other on his father.”

— Delia Owens

342. “Yet even when it fails, it connects you to others and, in the end, that is all you have, the connections.”

— Delia Owens

343. “Ever since Barkley Cove had been settled in 1751, no lawman extended his jurisdiction beyond the saw grass. In the 1940s and ’50s, a few sheriffs set hounds on some mainland convicts who’d escaped into the marsh, and the office still kept dogs just in case. But Jackson mostly ignored crimes committed in the swamp. Why interrupt rats killing rats?”

— Delia Owens

344. “When the soldiers tumbled back into the trench, dragging the sergeant, they assumed Jake had been hit while helping the others rescue their comrade. He was declared a hero. No one would ever know. Except Jake.”

— Delia Owens

345. “Two tours in ‘Nam. I’m staying in the army for a few more months. They’ve been good to me. Paid for my college degree – mechanical engineering, Georgia Tech. Least I can do is stay in a while.”

— Delia Owens

346. “The shack took on a different light, as though more windows had opened up. She stood back and stared at them – a miracle to have some of Ma’s paintings on the walls.”

— Delia Owens

347. “Hiya, Miss Kya. Got somebody here for ya to meet. This here’s ma wife, Mabel.”

— Delia Owens

348. “The shack stood silent against the early stir of blackbird wings, as an earnest winter fog formed along the ground, bunching up against the walls like large wisps of cotton.”

— Delia Owens

349. “Someone knew her name. She was taken aback.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens