Find Inspiring Quotes from Where the Crawdads Sing with Page Numbers

There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. (Page 1)

Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother. (Page 13)

The definition of loneliness is the ache we feel when we cease to see ourselves reflected in the eyes of others. (Page 29)

She felt fine, except when she thought too hard. Then her mind turned traitor and slipped her secrets she didn’t want to know. (Page 44)

Kya guessed that by age six she’d seen a thousand sand tracks and not two alike. (Page 57)

A person can get used to most anything. (Page 73)

The world tasted like grit and the salt wind; the marsh tasted of mud and salt and mosquitoes. (Page 89)

Delia bristled, saying Kya was a foolish girl, but all the while Kya knew Delia was spooked. (Page 105)

She knew the years touched her because her memory started slipping, until simple phrases went missing and the names of things floated around in her mind, disconnected from their meanings. (Page 118)

Kya swallowed hard. Finally, the rage swelled inside her, and she began to cry. ‘I ain’t no poet,’ she said, her voice breaking. (Page 132)

She fed the fire with a generosity that felt cathartic, as though pain and beauty shared the same lineage. (Page 147)

She remembered well the mercy of ribbons, and tomorrow she’d go to town and buy new ones for the corolla. (Page 161)

He felt a strange comfort in her embrace, a kind of belonging he’d never known, as if they had been tracing the same path all the while. (Page 177)

Some of life’s best lessons are the ones that can’t be learned from books. (Page 190)

She had never understood how the poor could live so because, like the mud in the marsh, she had scraped bottom before. (Page 204)

Books and people were always cross-talking, this one saying, ‘Look, look at me’; that one yammering, ‘No, look at me.’ (Page 217)

Most of what Yarnell knew came from his life experience–knowledge from books was slim. (Page 231)

Tate had never accepted Kya’s refusal to leave the marsh for civilization, thinking her strong enough to overcome anything. (Page 243)

She’d seen the same brilliance in the moon above the fireflies, as well as in the stars that spanned the black ocean. (Page 258)

The toll of his mind scrabbling for leaves in the dark corners of his brain led to heavy drinking, a means to scramble out of bad dreams. (Page 269)

Kya grinned. ‘What better way to study life than from the seat of a hiding place?’ (Page 284)

‘Ain’t many people got a secret cleaning catfish.’ Kya shook her head. ‘This ain’t a secret. It’s just not talk.”’ (Page 299)

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. (Page 313)

All the while, packs of gulls flew around them in tight circles, diving for baitfish disturbed by the men’s trawling. (Page 327)

He didn’t warn her that the human heart is a strange vessel, that even the best of intentions can fill it with sorrows. (Page 342)

No longer a tochana, when he slept in the swamp he was at home, the animals at peace with his presence. (Page 356)

He found a smile. Fiery eyes simmered down. She was jagged tracks of lightning, her fierce dignity unyielding as a fortress. (Page 369)

But as sweet as water running uphill, so is life to those who have tried too hard to extricate themselves from its swift currents. (Page 382)

A feather wavered down past her face and came to rest on her bedding, reminding her of wings and distances and unfulfilled dreams. (Page 396)

Fifty years had been enough. Long enough for Onslow to understand that the world turns on people’s desires as much as currents. (Page 412)

The isolation spun her mind to romance, as if she wile away the hours on the cape, like a princess idling in her tower. (Page 425)

The memory of him h o v e r e d just beyond her senses, like a wisp of fog floating unseen above the black water. (Page 440)

For two youngsters dirt poor and living in virtual isolation, it was overmuch to bear. (Page 456)

That very morning Jodie’s words clung to Kya like burrs from her journey into town. What if she tried tutoring again? (Page 470)

Surely something more than World Book Encyclopedia was spawned from the seed of his brow? But then she recalled, he was wi-fi illiterate. (Page 487)

She had a notion to run, dart back to the marsh, fear and her dignity floating like a banner behind her. (Page 502)

But the past dragged a net through her guts sometimes, a wind storm howling for a lost mother or all those brothers she’d never known. (Page 515)

Rain battered her, and the courthouse bared its heart of stone as if determined to announce, ‘You can’t win! You can’t win!’ (Page 529)

It took her along time to realize that she herself had preferred Seine and the marsh. (Page 542)

She heard him a long moment before he spoke, his slow coastal drawl deliberate, hanging between the marsh and the world beyond it. (Page 555)

The swamp was not simple silence, a man says, but soundings, pulsed through with echoes and complaints, threats and pleas. (Page 570)

It’s a mystery why men fear spiders, Kya thought. They’re soft and gentle to human touch, and only grip flesh in fear. (Page 586)

The world kept shaking and making itself known beyond the firelight, trucks groaning down the rutted service road and voices reaching across the water, one moment a mumble, the next shouted down a bullhorn, but always real, and Kya loved to hear it. (Page 601)

He turned and drifted back into the glade laughing, not so much at the Sheriff as with the butterflies who got to see everything first. (Page 615)

She felt like sand falling through fingers, then realized it happened to everyone. Bodies crumbled. Whole civilizations washed away. (Page 630)

She had always been a self-starter, much more comfortable when she poked her nose into the world without reason or apology. The never-ending varied routine fed her mind. (Page 649)

She dawdled, watching the white flakes spin down in the barren spaces between marl and cedar limbs. (Page 664)

Fascinated by the patterns of water, Kya could sit hours by the run against the stack of pillows her Ma left her. (Page 679)

Unlike the quieter marked circles left by wood ducks in decayed stumps, the sisters held onto their memories etched in the center. (Page 694)

Coming in, her eyes on the sea oats, she stripped off her white dress and Birkenstocks and walked into the water. (Page 707)