Onie Thanasouk

“Like any normal fifth grader, I preferred my villains to be evil and stay that way, to act like Dracula rather than Frankenstein's monster, who ruined everything by handing that peasant girl a flower. He sort of made up for it by drowning her a few minutes later, but, still, you couldn't look at him the same way again.”
― David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames

“When I arrived home from Boston, I realized there were no pictures on my mantel. I set down my suitcase and walked into the living room and looked across to the fireplace, and it felt empty. Empty of real stories. I went to my bedroom where the bed was made, and on my desk there were no pictures in frames and on the end tables there were no pictures. There was a framed picture of Yankee Stadium above the toilet in the bathroom, and there was some art I’d picked up in my travels, but there was little evidence of an actual character living an actual life. My home felt like a stage on which props had been set for a face story rather than a place where a person lived an actual human narrative.

It’s an odd feeling to be awakened from a life of fantasy. You stand there looking at a bare mantel and the house gets an eerie feel, as though it were haunted by a kind of nothingness, an absence of something that could have been, an absence of people who could have been living here, interacting with me, forcing me out of my daydreams. I stood for a while and heard the voices of children who didn’t exist and felt the tender touch of a wife who wanted me to listen to her. I felt, at once, the absent glory of a life that could have been.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“and tell him I want power over the sun”
― Jacob Grimm, Once Upon a Time: A Collection of Classic Fairy Tales

“Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,
but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.”
― Katherine Paterson, The Spying Heart: More Thoughts on Reading and Writing Books for Children