Thomas Keneally Quotes & Sayings

Australia integrated the - brought on the ships and unleashed in the society the dogs of sectarianism, which had existed in other places - in Glasgow, in Liverpool and of course in Ireland, north and south. — Thomas Keneally

In the mind of a true snob there are certain limited criteria to denote the value of human existence. Jimmie's criteria were: home, hearth, wife, land. Those who possessed these had beatitude unchallengable. Other men had accidental, random life. Nothing better. — Thomas Keneally

He manifested a resolution which amounted to sternness. — Thomas Keneally

Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don't — Thomas Keneally

But re-reading Voss also demonstrates again that although White wasn't 'a nice man', and indeed was - perhaps rightly - scathingly dismissive of my and other Australian writers' work and origins unless they were his friends, he was a genius, and Voss one of the finest works of the modernist era and of the past century. — Thomas Keneally

You know, so I was a weird eccentric kid but I did believe in the power of the word and of the word being made flesh I suppose, which again I suppose came from my temperament as well as my upbringing. — Thomas Keneally

Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire. — Thomas Keneally

I was never any good at cricket thought I love it as a, as a sort of mystery. — Thomas Keneally

So I remember both medicine, because I frequently sick, particularly with asthma for which there was no proper treatment then, and in religion I had a strong sense of there being a patriarchy. — Thomas Keneally

Paradox is beloved of novelists. The despised savior, the humane whore, the selfish man suddenly munificent, the wise fool, and the cowardly hero. Most writers spend their lives writing about unexpected malice in the supposedly virtuous, and unexpected virtue in the supposedly sinful. — Thomas Keneally

The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All round its cramped margins lies the gulf. — Thomas Keneally

And so um, I knew that I really didn't want to be a priest and didn't want to be a celibate, though I could probably manage it. Um, and um, ultimately I left. — Thomas Keneally

The List is Life.", Schindler's List — Thomas Keneally

So nonetheless given the importance that was placed on sport in Australia, I wanted to be part of that scene, particularly since I had felt very strongly in my early schooling being marginalised even in the Catholic school. — Thomas Keneally

My brother arrived some months after my father left. Um, and he ah, was thus eight years younger than me and it was um, you know, it was such a time that my mother probably had people wondering was it his. — Thomas Keneally

Thomas was my true name but everyone knew me as Mick, except my mother, who knew me as definitely Michael. — Thomas Keneally

And I was very interested in the priesthood. — Thomas Keneally

It is not too fantastic to say that he desired them with some of the absolute passion that characterised the exposed and flaming heart of Jesus which hung on Emilie's wall. Since this narrative has tried to avoid the canonisation of the Herr Direktor, the idea of the sensual Oskar as the desirer of souls has to be proved. — Thomas Keneally

Now that I was a novelist, I could not face the ignominy of failing to produce novels. — Thomas Keneally

But I was also a brat. I used to belong to a gang that went looking for fights with other gangs. — Thomas Keneally

So I was very close to ordination. I was delighted to be ordained a deacon, which is the last step between, before becoming a priest. But then it all fell apart. — Thomas Keneally

Even among Sedlacek's own small cell, his Viennese anti-Nazi club, it was not imagined that the pursuit of the Jews had grown quite so systematic. Not only was the story Schindler told him startling simply in moral terms: one was asked to believe that in the midst of a desperate battle, the National Socialists would devote thousands of men, the resources of precious railroads, and enormous cubic footage of cargo space, expensive techniques of engineering, a fatal margin of their research-and-development scientists, a substantial bureaucracy, whole arsenals of automatic weapons, whole magazines of ammunition, all to an extermination which had no military or economic meaning but merely a psychological one. — Thomas Keneally

Personal finances are like people's personal health, crucial and tragic to the sufferer but tedious to the listener. — Thomas Keneally

Now, even if he and Dr B made their decision, D didn't know if he had the rigour to feed the cyanide to the ill, or to watch someone else do it and maintain a professional disposition. It was absurdley like the argument in one's youth, about whether you should approach a girl you were infatuated with. And when you'd decide, it still counted for nothing. The act still had to be faced. — Thomas Keneally

And I think my sexuality was heavily repressed by the church, by the, you know, the design of the mortal sins. — Thomas Keneally

And it is a folly to try to craft a novel for the screen, to write a novel with a screen contract in mind. — Thomas Keneally

Sometimes tyrants do away with the necessity of satire by imposing absurdity themselves. — Thomas Keneally

All right, Herr Stern, if God made man in His image, which race is most like him? Is a Pole more like him than a Czech? — Thomas Keneally

Coitus is random, children are definite. — Thomas Keneally

And I definitely wanted to be a writer, but I felt a duty now, having used up those educational resources, I felt a duty to the church and my parents to become a priest. — Thomas Keneally

The truest crime remaining to him to commit was the waste of love. It should be bequeathed, as land is. — Thomas Keneally

But in practice Australia - the pluralism of Australia - sorry the sectarianism to an extent stopped at the time you took your uniform off after coming home from school. — Thomas Keneally

In a way Australia is like Catholicism. The company is sometimes questionable and the landscape is grotesque. But you always come back. — Thomas Keneally

Fatal human malice is the staple of narrators, original sin the mother-fluid of historians. But it is a risky enterprise to have to write of virtue. — Thomas Keneally

High Europe always played at ethnic contempt because it was High Europe, and so had the strength, the authority, to make the racial rules. We great unwashed of the outer world, on the coasts of new continents, though we might ourselves have behaved atrociously to indigenes, were baffled by the determination with which Europe returned to the frenzies of racial myth. Nice boys and not-so-nice boys took up the theme, put on the uniform, did the dirty work. — Thomas Keneally

The taste one gets of death in dreams I find more penetrating and atmospheric than the ordinary fear one might suffer while awake. — Thomas Keneally

But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn't do as much harm as is claimed-and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish-is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative. — Thomas Keneally

The dogs were really keening now, like Irish widows. — Thomas Keneally

I must apologise because I know all writers have memories of being on the outer because it's the children on the side of the playground who become the dangerous writers. — Thomas Keneally

We humbly beg your kind applause, murmured Mary Brenham, with a creative frown that reminded Ralph of Betsey Alicia and made him sharply aware there was nothing that moved him like a cloud of intellection on a desired face. — Thomas Keneally

And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s. — Thomas Keneally

He was one of those men who, even in the years of peace, would have advised his congregation that while God may well be honored by the inflexibility of the pious, he might also be honored by the flexibility of the sensible. — Thomas Keneally

It was so like old times that Henry found himself smiling down at Olek and Mance, playing to her, capable of ignoring the rest. It did seem for those seconds that the earth had at last been pacified by music. — Thomas Keneally

Oskar showed that virtue emerged where it would, and the sort of churchy observance bishops called for was not a guarantee of genuine humanity in a person. — Thomas Keneally

It's only when you abandon your ambitions that they become possible. — Thomas Keneally

It was a great gift which the National Socialist Party had given to the men of the SS, that they could go into battle without physical risk, that they could achieve honor without the contingencies that plagued the whole business of being shot at. — Thomas Keneally

Oskar knew people would catch that trolley anyhow. Doors closed, no stops, machine guns on walls - it wouldn't matter. Humans were incurable that way. People would try to get off it, someone's loyal Polish maid with a parcel of sausage. And people would try to get on, some fast-moving athletic young man like Leopold Pfefferberg with a pocketful of diamonds or Occupation zloty or a message in code for the partisans. People responded to any slim chance, even if it was an outside one, its doors locked shut, moving fast between mute walls. — Thomas Keneally

Um, what I found though about the Christian Brothers is this: that they were certainly muscular. — Thomas Keneally

I thought I'd definitely be a writer, whatever I did. — Thomas Keneally

The principle was, death should not be entered like some snug harbor. It should be an unambiguous refusal to surrender. — Thomas Keneally

And I liked pluralist Australia. I got a taste for pluralist Australia. I like, I like Australians and I can't believe that they're going to go to hell because they tell a good dirty joke, you know. — Thomas Keneally