A biography for Isabel Gillieshasn’t been written yet.
“No one is all good or all bad, and there's many different ways to go about your life.”
“I've always been the person at the table who is like, 'I have this weird rash. Anybody else have this?'”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“My mother has always been a worker bee, but she's also a serious foodie.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I really think the human experience is very similar for everyone; we're all doing slightly different versions of the same thing.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Sprinkling drops of lavender and clary-sage oil into a bath is a totally simple yet complex pleasure.”
“Life is funny, at the same time being totally harsh.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“Reading cookbooks will help with just about anything in your life, including heartbreak.”
“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.”