Quotes from Jennifer Gilmore

What is it about the blank page that makes me want to hurl myself into a game of solitaire? I ask myself these kinds of questions while I'm playing solitaire.

I think publishing's strength is also its weakness. It's got such a rich and celebrated history as an industry. For the most part, publishing people are incredibly creative, business is done based on the strength of relationships, and the product being peddled is books.

As writers, we don't just need to write about poverty or war or the immigrant experience.

I couldn't really experience being an author when I was still working in publishing - I was trying to negotiate being both. Sometimes the knowledge doesn't translate between the two roles.

I had the worst feeling, when I hung up, that I had missed the purpose of our conversation, that we both had. We had been apart for so long and no longer knew how to speak, other than as strangers. How are you feeling? we said, but what we meant was, Where are you? who are you now? Are you still in there?

You think the worst is behind you, but it's never behind you. In fact, saying something is the worst does not leave room for all the bad stuff that can follow it. You say the pain is nine, but you mean ten. You leave room.

Sometimes you stop seeing what the person is to the world. You only see what the person is to you.

Connor beams, and the light inside him somehow manages to burn brighter.

Before I'd even said hello, Connor was telling me good-bye.

I tried to let myself just... be. It was hard to let not knowing what was about to happen be a good thing. But I tried it out. Being in the moment. Not in the past or in the future. In this moment now.

Lizzie,' he said. It was only my name, but in it was all these different emotions at aonce. A prism in a word.

Question: Who do you go to first? The boy you love or the boy you love's dog?

He stood up and we hugged. This is what it was like: like all the parts of me that had been exposed, all my nerves and cells and synapses, were finally again connected. Click. Connor.

When had I stopped disparaging my parents' way of life and had instead begun to covet it?

all her hates were merely fears turned around

I know publishing now more as an author than with occasional peaks inside those elite offices than as an industry insider. It was difficult publishing a novel the first time around, while working behind the scenes, knowing all that has to happen to make a book a success and to still make the leap as an author.

Publishing in a way doesn't have a lot to do with writing, and writing doesn't have a lot to do with publishing.

I really don't feel that writing is therapy.

It would be a lie to say that people are coming to adoption with joy at all times. Hope, perhaps, but it would be disingenuous to say that every part coming to an adoption isn't seriously grieving.

People might seem to have a perfectly fine life but inside, we don't even know if they've suffered.

My father is an economist who specialized in foreign food policy, and my mother worked for AID, a branch of the State Department, so food in regards to world affairs was talked about a lot.

I wanted a baby of color, to be honest, because I wasn't attached to the idea that I look like the biological mother. I liked the idea of the adoption being clear; it was and is not something I am interested in hiding.

With domestic adoption, you get a form, you fill it out, and there are these boxes: African-American, African-American and Hispanic, and you check the boxes that you're comfortable with. Race is completely open in that regard.

While I am very much Jewish 'identified,' I'm not a very religious person.