Delia Owens Quotes

“Female fireflies draw in strange males with dishonest signals and eat them; mantis females devour their own mates. Female insects, Kya thought, know how to deal with their lovers.”

“There are sounds, of course, but compared to the marsh, the swamp is quiet because decomposition is cellular work.”

“Why should the injured, the still bleeding, bear the onus of forgiveness?”

“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.”

“Please don’t talk to me about isolation. No one has to tell me how it changes a person. I have lived it. I am isolation.

“Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn’t know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land who caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.”

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

“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.”

“Autumn leaves don’t fall, they fly. They take their time and wander on this their only chance to soar.”

“The marsh did not confine them but defined them and, like any sacred ground, kept their secrets deep.”

“Needing people ended in hurt.”

“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.”

“‘What d’ya mean, where the crawdads sing? Ma used to say that.’ Kya remembered Ma always encouraging her to explore the marsh: ‘Go as far as you can --- way out yonder where the crawdads sing.’ Tate said, ‘Just means far in the bush where critters are wild, still behaving like critters.‘”

“If anyone would understand loneliness, the moon would.”

“Perhaps love is best left as a fallow field.”

“Leaning on someone leaves you on the ground.”

“How much do you trade to defeat loneliness?”

“She knew the years of isolation had altered her behavior until she was different from others, but it wasn’t her fault she’d been alone. Most of what she knew, she’d learned from the wild. Nature had nurtured, tutored, and protected her when no one else would.”

“Sand keeps secrets better than mud.”

“Loneliness has a compass of its own.”

“I wasn’t aware that words could hold so much. I didn’t know a sentence could be so full.”

“That’s what sisters and girlfriends are all about. Sticking together even in the mud, ’specially in mud.”

“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.”

“Unworthy boys make a lot of noise”

“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.”

“She laughed for his sake, something she’d never done. Giving away another piece of herself just to have someone else.”

“Time ensures children never know their parents young.”

“She could read anything now, he said, and once you can read anything you can learn everything. It was up to her. “Nobody’s come close to filling their brains,” he said. “We’re all like giraffes not using their necks to reach the higher leaves.”

“Never underrate the heart, Capable of deeds The mind cannot conceive. The heart dictates as well as feels. How else can you explain The path I have taken, That you have taken The long way through this pass?”

“Biology sees right and wrong as the same color in different light.”