Top 450 Delia Owens Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “But in her twenty-second year, more than a year after Chase and Pearl announced their engagement, she walked the sandy lane, blistering with heat, to the mailbox every day and looked inside. Finally one morning, she found a bulky manila envelope and slid the contents – an advance copy of The Sea Shells of the Eastern Seaboard, by Catherine Danielle Clark – into her hands. She breathed in, no one to show it to.”

— Delia Owens

352. “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

353. “Before moving, Vern stared for a long minute at Chase, as though he had overlooked something. As a doctor, he should fix this. Heavy swamp air stood.”

— Delia Owens

354. “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

355. “But this time there was laughter and love.”

— Delia Owens

356. “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

357. “Kya leaned over gently, as if to kiss a baby. The microscope’s light reflected in her dark pupils, and she drew in a breath as a Mardi Gras of costumed players pirouetted and careened into view. Unimaginable headdresses adorned astonishing bodies so eager for more life, they frolicked as though caught in a circus tent, not a single bead of water.”

— Delia Owens

358. “Pa had always bought the kerosene and filled the lamp, so she hadn’t thought much about it. Until it was dark.”

— Delia Owens

359. “Even Jodie had said she should give Tate another chance. But every time she thought of him or saw him, her heart jumped from the old love to the pain of abandonment. She wished it would settle on one side or the other.”

— Delia Owens

360. “She’d always found the muscle and heart to pull herself from the mire, to take the next step, no matter how shaky. But where had all that grit brought her?”

— Delia Owens

361. “Kya wondered who started using the word cell instead of cage.”

— Delia Owens

362. “Ma warning her older sisters about young men who overrevved their rusted-out pickups or drove jalopies around with radios blaring. “Unworthy boys make a lot of noise,” Ma had said.”

— Delia Owens

363. “Jodie, I’m so sorry you worried about leaving me. Not once did I blame you. We were the victims, not the guilty.”

— Delia Owens

364. “Without another word, he got in his boat and motored across the lagoon. Just before entering the thick brambles of the channel, he turned and waved. She lifted her hand high above her head, and then touched it to her heart.”

— Delia Owens

365. “Kya, you know why. I just can’t do that. I want to study the marsh, be a research biologist.” They had reached the beach and sat on the sand. “Then what? There’re no jobs like that here. You’ll never come home again.” “Yes, I will. I won’t leave you, Kya. I promise. I’ll come back to you.”

— Delia Owens

366. “One at a time, then ten at a time, then hundreds of geese landed only yards from where Kya and Tate had sat under the ferns. The sky emptied as the wet meadow filled until it was covered in downy snow. No fancy dining room could compare to that, and the coon balls offered more spice and flare than almond-crusted trout.”

— Delia Owens

367. “Before Pa strung it up, the bream flopped around in the boat bottom and Kya had to watch a distant string of pelicans, study the cloud forms, anything but look into dying fish eyes staring at a world without water, wide mouth sucking worthless air. But what it cost her and what it cost that fish was worth it to have this little shred of family. Perhaps not for the fish, but still.”

— Delia Owens

368. “She would not be drawn back to someone she couldn’t trust. ‘I don’t know how to. I could never believe you again.”

— Delia Owens

369. “Clouds lazed in the folded arms of the hills, then billowed up and drifted away. Some tendrils twisted into tight spirals and traced the warmer ravines, behaving like mist tracking the dank fens of the marsh. The same game of physics playing on a different field of biology.”

— Delia Owens

370. “Aldo Leopold taught her that floodplains are living extensions of the rivers, which will claim them back any time they choose. Anyone living on a floodplain is just waiting in the river’s wings.”

— Delia Owens

371. “They sat there like that, quietly. Not remembering.”

— Delia Owens

372. “Unfortunately gravity holds no sway on human thought.”

— Delia Owens

373. “Her heart beat wildly. Of all the ragged loves she’d known from wayward family, none had felt like this.”

— Delia Owens

374. “Mrs. Singletary’s hair was cut short, curled tight, and colored purple as an iris in sunlight.”

— Delia Owens

375. “Chase’s blue eyes were playful; he smiled easily.”

— Delia Owens

376. “Autumn was coming; the evergreens might not have noticed, but the sycamores did.”

— Delia Owens

377. “Pennies and Grits 1956.”

— Delia Owens

378. “Kya watched him gimp along the path, left leg swinging to the side, then forward. Her fingers knotted. Maybe they were all going to leave her, one by one down this lane. When he reached the road and unexpectedly looked back, she threw her hand up and waved hard. A shot to keep him tethered. Pa lifted an arm in a quick, dismissive salutation. But it was something. It was more than Ma had done.”

— Delia Owens

379. “A dark clearing – one of her favorite places – spread cavernlike under five oaks so dense only hazy streams of sunlight filtered through the canopy, striking lush patches of trillium and white violets.”

— Delia Owens

380. “But knowing that these tendencies are in our biological blueprints might help one forgive even a failed mother.”

— Delia Owens

381. “Rosemary said Ma never made friends, never dined with the family or interacted with anybody. She allowed herself no life, no pleasure.”

— Delia Owens

382. “Much older than she, eleven, maybe twelve.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

384. “That anticipation of touch.”

— Delia Owens

385. “They had abandoned her to survive and defend herself. So here she was, by herself.”

— Delia Owens

386. “The sun, still shy and submissive to winter, peeped in now and then between days of mean wind and bitter rain. Then one afternoon, just like that, spring elbowed her way in for good. The day warmed, and the sky shone as if polished.”

— Delia Owens

387. “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

388. “Red Fibers 1969.”

— Delia Owens

389. “She insisted on keeping the kitchen as it was and the exterior unpainted, so that the dwelling, more of a cabin now, remained weathered and real.”

— Delia Owens

390. “As they climbed, the round corners of the world moved out farther and farther, the lush, rounded forests and watery marsh expanding to the very rims.”

— Delia Owens

391. “In a whisper, she asked, “Who’s who?”

— Delia Owens

392. “Why would Chase open this one in the.”

— Delia Owens

393. “I’ve about had it with flying,” he grumbled, switching off the plane’s systems, “It’s ninety-nine percent boring and one percent sheer terror.”

— Delia Owens

394. “Not knowing how to count the exact amount, she laid down the whole dollar.”

— Delia Owens

395. “For a scavenger, patience is the key to the pantry.”

— Delia Owens

396. “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

397. “Oh, by the way,” Chase said. “I have to drive over to Asheville in a few days to buy goods for the.”

— Delia Owens

398. “The sheriff was silent a few seconds. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m getting old and soft at the grand ol’ age of fifty-one. But running down a woman with hounds for questioning doesn’t seem right. It’s fine for escaped convicts, people already convicted of some crime. But, like everybody else, she’s innocent until proven guilty, and I can’t see setting hounds on a female suspect. Maybe as a last resort, but not yet.”

— Delia Owens

399. “A hollowness that urgently needed filling pulsed through her.”

— Delia Owens

400. “For months Ma was mute, didn’t speak one word. She stayed in her old room in her parents’ home, barely eating. Of course, they had doctors come out, but no one could help her. Ma’s father contacted the sheriff in Barkley Cove to ask if Ma’s children were all right, but his office said they didn’t even try to keep track of the marsh people.”

— Delia Owens