Top 450 Delia Owens Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Ya need some girlfriends, hon, ’cause they’re furever. Without a vow. A clutch of women’s the most tender, most tough place on Earth.”

— Delia Owens

352. “She stared, not knowing how to see this. Would she have to go somewhere, meet people? Tate didn’t miss the questions in her eyes.”

— Delia Owens

353. “As always, the ocean seemed angrier than the marsh. Deeper, it had more to say.”

— Delia Owens

354. “Just before he stepped into the trees, she finally turned and watched him walk away. “This little piggy stayed home,” she said to the waves.”

— Delia Owens

355. “Sleep avoided her, slinking around the edges, then darting away. Her mind would plunge along deep walls of sudden slumber – an instant of bliss.”

— Delia Owens

356. “Her most poignant memories were unknown dates of family members disappearing down the lane.”

— Delia Owens

357. “He leaned slightly forward, as if to hug her, but the hardened rinds of her heart held her back.”

— Delia Owens

358. “You all listen now, this is a real lesson in life. Yes, we got stuck, but what’d we girls do? We made it fun, we laughed. That’s what sisters and girlfriends are all about. Sticking together even in the mud, ’specially in mud.”

— Delia Owens

359. “Uncertainty lingered, but the more she thought about it, the less likely it seemed the boy meant harm. It didn’t fit that anyone who liked birds would be mean.”

— Delia Owens

360. “A few weeks later, watching pelicans float and feed in the sea, her boat riding up and down waves, Kya’s stomach suddenly cramped up. She’d never been seasick, and this felt different from any pain she’d ever had.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

363. “I have almost no recollection of the few hours after we left the plateau. I think I was concentrating so hard on the immediate that my mind couldn’t afford space for anything else. Maybe to have a memory, you need time for reflection, however brief, just to let the memory find a place to settle.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

365. “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

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

— Delia Owens

367. “Croker Sacks Full 1956 In the winter of 1956, when Kya was ten, Pa.”

— Delia Owens

368. “You’re worse than he is. He might not be perfect, but you’re worse by a long shot.”

— Delia Owens

369. “Faces change with life’s toll, but eyes remain a window to what was...”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

371. “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

372. “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

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

— Delia Owens

374. “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

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

— Delia Owens

376. “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

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

— Delia Owens

378. “That anticipation of touch.”

— Delia Owens

379. “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

380. “But, being only seven and a girl, she’d never taken the boat out by herself.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

382. “She held it against her heart. Where else would one need a compass more than in this place?”

— Delia Owens

383. “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

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

— Delia Owens

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “Maybe Ma was never coming home. Maybe some dreams should just fade away.”

— Delia Owens

389. “At the bottom of the carton was a note.”

— Delia Owens

390. “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

391. “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

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

— Delia Owens

393. “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

394. “He was a page of time, a clipping pasted in a scrapbook because it was she had.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

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

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens