Top 450 Delia Owens Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Finally she said, “What do you want now, Tate?” “If only you could, some way, forgive me.” He breathed in and waited.”

— Delia Owens

402. “A small covey gathered around Chase’s parents. Patti Love wept. Sarah Singletary scowled like everybody else but discovered that she was greatly relieved. Miss Pansy hoped no one saw her jaw relax. A lone tear trailed down Mrs. Culpepper’s cheek, and then a shadow smile for the little swamp truant escaping again.”

— Delia Owens

403. “From the Marsh Girl Tate read the words, then turned away, staring.”

— Delia Owens

404. “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

405. “She kept on buying gas and supplies from him but never accepted a handout from them again. And each time she came to his wharf, she saw her book propped up in the tiny window for all to see. As a father would have shown it.”

— Delia Owens

406. “But when the Depression deepened, the bank auctioned the land out from under the Clarks’ feet, and his father took Jake from school.”

— Delia Owens

407. “Back home, thinking she knew how to fix grits, she threw them into boiling water like Ma had done, but they lumped up all together in one big ball that burned on the bottom and stayed raw in the middle. So rubbery she could only eat a few bites, so she searched the garden again and found a few more turnip greens between the goldenrod. Then boiled them up and ate them all, slurping down the pot likker.”

— Delia Owens

408. “Who decides the time to die?”

— Delia Owens

409. “WEEK LATER, Kya heard Tate’s boat whirring.”

— Delia Owens

410. “The Game 1960 The next noon, hands on her cheeks, Kya approached the stump slowly, almost in prayer. But no feather on the stump. Her lips pinched. “A’ course. I gotta leave something for him.”

— Delia Owens

411. “White Canoe 1960.”

— Delia Owens

412. “July 4 1961 Dressed in the now too-short peach chiffon, Kya walked barefoot to the lagoon on July 4 and sat on the reading-log.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

414. “In the mountains, she noticed, the time of sunset depended on where you stood on the hill.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

416. “Kya turned the page to continue the story, and there loomed a large picture of Chase and a girl above an engagement announcement: Andrews-Stone.”

— Delia Owens

417. “Kya remembered, those many years ago, 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. She read a consolation for females. 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

418. “She touched the pages and remembered each shell and the story of finding it, where it lay on the beach, the season, the sunrise. A family album.”

— Delia Owens

419. “Breathing hard, he stared at his decision hiding there in cord grass: Kya or everything else.”

— Delia Owens

420. “In the distance, the sea and sky sang too bright for this serious ground.”

— Delia Owens

421. “She anchored him hard with her eyes. Afraid to go near him, afraid not to.”

— Delia Owens

422. “She sat quiet. Finally she said, “Why do you have to go, Tate? Why can’t you stay here, shrimp like your dad?” “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.”

— Delia Owens

423. “Yeah, we all got magnolia mouth, being from the North Carolina sticks, but we have to try.”

— Delia Owens

424. “It’s a two-day job, so we’ll have to stay overnight.”

— Delia Owens

425. “Talvez alguns sonhos devessem simplesmente passar.”

— Delia Owens

426. “Slowly, she unraveled each word of the sentence: “’There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.”

— Delia Owens

427. “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

428. “So she planned up something that lots of people would see her do. Making a great alibi right in front of all those folks on Main Street. Brilliant.”

— Delia Owens

429. “I wadn’t aware that words could hold so much. I didn’t know a sentence.”

— Delia Owens

430. “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

431. “And even though she couldn’t write, Kya had found a way to label her specimens. Her talent had matured and now she could draw, paint, and sketch anything. Using chalks or watercolors from the Five and Dime, she sketched the birds, insects, or shells on grocery bags and attached them to her samples.”

— Delia Owens

432. “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

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

— Delia Owens

434. “Had he not been so obsessed with his own heart, perhaps he would have noticed his father’s was failing.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

436. “She sent her toes on missions to scout for cool spots between the sheets, but they found none.”

— Delia Owens

437. “Faces change with life’s toll, but eyes remain a window to what was, and she could see him there. “Jodie, I’m so.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

439. “Then swore louder and meaner than the wind.”

— Delia Owens

440. “Yes, Chase had laid out a banquet, but she was worth more than fried chicken.”

— Delia Owens

441. “We’re all like giraffes not using their necks to reach the higher leaves.”

— Delia Owens

442. “Hello, dear, I’m Mrs. Culpepper. You’re all grown up and ready to go to school, aren’t ya?”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

444. “Ma had painted the estuaries and sunsets in oils and watercolors so rich they seemed peeled from the earth. She had brought some art supplies with her and could buy bits and pieces at Kress’s Five and Dime. Sometimes Ma had let Kya paint her own pictures on brown paper bags from the Piggly Wiggly.”

— Delia Owens

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

— Delia Owens

446. “Her carefully labeled samples, more than fifty years’ worth, was the longest-running, most complete collection of its kind. She had requested that it be donated to Archbald Lab, and someday he would do so, but parting with it now was unthinkable.”

— Delia Owens

447. “No one in the room had ever experienced this collective heart pounding, this shared lack of breath. Eyes shifted, hands sweated. The shrimper crew, Hal Miller, knotted his mind, fighting to confirm that it truly was Miss Clark’s boat he had seen that night. Suppose he’d been wrong. Most stared, not at the back of Kya’s head, but at the floor, the walls. It seemed that the village – not Kya – awaited judgment, and few felt the salacious joy they had expected at this juncture.”

— Delia Owens

448. “We were the victims, not the guilty.” He smiled. “Thank you, Kya.”

— Delia Owens

449. “She was better off to leave ’em, heal herself up, then whelp more when she could raise ’em good.”

— Delia Owens

450. “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.”

— Delia Owens