Isabel Gillies quotes:

In New York, everybody looks great and is well dressed, but seeing someone in Ohio wearing Marc Jacobs is like spotting an owl in Central Park. Rare.

When you have a traumatic event in your life, you change. You're not the same person you were, and you have to discover who you've become.

The Oberlin/Cleveland area is where the underground railroad came out, so it's an interesting historical place. I love Ohio and really loved Oberlin.

I believe in love. I believe in hard times and love winning. I believe marriage is hard. I believe people make mistakes. I believe people can want two things at once. I believe people are selfish and generous at the same time. I believe very few people want to hurt others. I believe that you can be surprised by life. I believe in happy endings.

When you work alone at home, time can become shapeless. There are no eleven o'clock meetings or afternoon coffee breaks. The light outside may clue me in to what part of the day it is, but if all is going well, the hours bleed together.

It was a long time ago: 'Angela's Ashes' by Frank McCourt. It was a great story that was lasting, and I loved it so much. I also love Nora Ephron. I gobble up everything she writes. Also, I love Anthony Bourdain, very irreverent and funny.

Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series is a national treasure, beloved by generations. But what I love most is the peek it provides into the planting, harvesting, hunting, and preparing of the foods that America's settler families ate in the late 1800s.

Growing up, I'll always remember knowing from movies and TV that there was a possibility that you wouldn't fall in love. I always thought, 'Oh my God, I hope I'm not that person.'

Skeptical of strangers, lobstermen are keepers of secrets, working in the howling wind and hot sun, the icy snows, and bewildering fog. When I was growing up, the lore was that they had the right to shoot anyone who messed with their traps.

Accounts of eating Christmas sweet potatoes baked in ashes and jackrabbit stewed with white flour dumplings are testaments to pioneer resilience and pleasure - and they help inspire my own best scratch cooking.

Anita Shreve is an author I adore. I rip through her meaty books and get off on the robust romance immensely - especially if I am feeling less than robust in my real life.

I don't think anyone would bat an eye if I wrote a song.

I had been living in Ohio in my own house with my own life when my marriage abruptly came to an end. I had nowhere to go with my two sons, very little money, and not much to do in Ohio except be someone's ex-wife. My parents instantly and very generously invited my family to move back home to New York, where I could begin again.

Therapy is therapy. Writing is for writing.

No one is all good or all bad, and there's many different ways to go about your life.

When I was growing up, my mother worked, and in the evenings, the whole family would sit around the dinner table and recount the day.

There are a lot of great love stories. It's just the best thing. Why wouldn't you write about it? Why wouldn't you want to read about it? But it's hard to write about. It's weird to have such a powerful and universal feeling and hope that you can write that and make it real for people.

When your heart is broken, you feel like no freaking book in the world could help you because a book is not the person who you love, who doesn't love you. However, books help, if only because they serve as something you can hold in your hand and throw across the room in agony.

When I think of the moment I knew that my marriage to Josiah would end, there were a few moments before I really, really knew. I probably knew, when I saw my ex-husband and his now wife - then colleague - having tea together in his office, that something was amiss.

My mother worked full-time running a foundation, but she found all the time in the world to have supper ready every night, feed us shirred eggs on the weekends, and produce a leg of lamb for my fourth-grade Bedouin feast at school.

You see, I am friends with a lobsterman. Because we are friends, which feels lucky anyway, I get access to the most amazing fish. It's like having a backstage pass - a culinary jackpot that feels almost undeserved.

Sometimes it makes me sad that I didn't get to have one family for my entire life.

There has never been a shrimp that I've eaten that I haven't been like, 'I am so lucky that I get to eat this.' I would eat a shrimp enchilada, shrimp burrito, shrimp cocktail, fried shrimp, shrimp po boy, shrimp gumbo.

Life is funny, at the same time being totally harsh.

Sprinkling drops of lavender and clary-sage oil into a bath is a totally simple yet complex pleasure.

Reading cookbooks will help with just about anything in your life, including heartbreak.

I didn't think anything I wrote was going to get published. I'm a dyslexic kid who had tutors through college. But I had a very strong impulse to write.

After I clean my face, I use combinations of sweet-almond, meadowfoam, grape-seed, coconut, black-currant, and argan oils to hydrate. Argan is probably my favorite for my face.

My mother has always been a worker bee, but she's also a serious foodie.

In fact, you-he pointed his fork at me-look like a fairy tale.

If you are heartbroken and can't face the world, you need something with a fantastic plot. You won't be able to read anything boring because your attention span when you are heartbroken decreases by three-quarters.

I've always been the person at the table who is like, 'I have this weird rash. Anybody else have this?'

I love memoirs and biographies, learning about other people's lives. Two of the ones that I loved so much were actually edited by the same person who edited my book, too. I loved 'Angela's Ashes.' I loved 'Glass Castle' so much.

I love teenagers. I loved being a teenager.

You find out what you are made of when you have a broken heart. If it happens early and often, all the better.

As moisturizers, oils rapidly penetrate the deeper layers of the skin, protecting against the breakdown of proteins in the cell wall with fatty and linoleic acids, mimicking what our bodies produce naturally. The oils also function as humectants, which help our skin retain moisture.

I think even if you haven't been divorced, you can hopefully relate to having to navigate through a really difficult time and see how you can get through to the other side and how you can stay positive, even if there's some really bad stuff happening.