Where the Crawdads Sing

She knew it wasn’t Chase she mourned, but a life defined by rejections. As the sky and clouds struggled overhead, she said out loud, “I have to do life alone. But I knew this. I’ve known a long time that people don’t stay.”

Tate remembered his dad’s definition of a man: one who can cry freely, feel poetry and opera in his heart, and do whatever it takes to defend a woman

Standing in the most fragile place of her life, she turned to the only net she knew—herself.

If those she’d loved, including Jodie and Tate, hadn’t left her, she wouldn’t be here. Leaning on someone leaves you on the ground.

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.

She knew it wasn’t Chase she mourned, but a life defined by rejections. As the sky and clouds struggled overhead, she said out loud, “I have to do life alone. But I knew this. I’ve known a long time that people don’t stay.”

Ma had said women need one another more than they need men, but she never told her how to get inside the pride.

Tate remembered his dad’s definition of a man: one who can cry freely, feel poetry and opera in his heart, and do whatever it takes to defend a woman.

You can’t get hurt when you love someone from the other side of an estuary.

She whispered a verse by Amanda Hamilton:
“You came again,
Blinding my eyes
Like the shimmer of sun upon the sea.
Just as I feel free
The moon casts your face upon the sill.
Each time I forget you
Your eyes haunt my heart and it falls still.
And so farewell
Until the next time you come,
Until at last I do not see you.”