Quotes from Isabel Gillies

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.'

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.

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.

I love teenagers. I loved being a teenager.

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.

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.

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.

Therapy is therapy. Writing is for writing.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

I am not a writer, but I have been told I write good emails.