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Top Thomas Keneally Quotes

Browse top 44 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Thomas Keneally.

Favorite Thomas Keneally Quotes

1. "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
2. "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
3. "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
4. "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
5. "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
6. "In a way Australia is like Catholicism. The company is sometimes questionable and the landscape is grotesque. But you always come back." ~ Thomas Keneally
7. "Thomas was my true name but everyone knew me as Mick, except my mother, who knew me as definitely Michael." ~ Thomas Keneally
8. "Um, what I found though about the Christian Brothers is this: that they were certainly muscular." ~ Thomas Keneally
9. "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
10. "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
11. "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
12. "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
13. "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
14. "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
15. "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
16. "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
17. "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
18. "And I think my sexuality was heavily repressed by the church, by the, you know, the design of the mortal sins." ~ Thomas Keneally
19. "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
20. "And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s." ~ Thomas Keneally
21. "And I was very interested in the priesthood." ~ Thomas Keneally
22. "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
23. "But I was also a brat. I used to belong to a gang that went looking for fights with other gangs." ~ Thomas Keneally
24. "I thought I'd definitely be a writer, whatever I did." ~ Thomas Keneally
25. "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
26. "Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don't" ~ Thomas Keneally
27. "The List is Life.", Schindler's List" ~ Thomas Keneally
28. "The principle was, death should not be entered like some snug harbor. It should be an unambiguous refusal to surrender." ~ Thomas Keneally
29. "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
30. "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
31. "He [Rabbi Menasha Levartov] 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
32. "If Frau Rasch, in the last and fullest days of her husband's power in Brno, had idly—during a party, say; a musical recital at the castle—gazed into the core of the diamond that had come to her from Oskar Schindler, she would have seen reflected there the worst incubus from her own dreams and her Führer's. An armed Marxist Jew." ~ Thomas Keneally
33. "Vina e un vis, mila e singura realitate." ~ Thomas Keneally
34. "Now that I was a novelist, I could not face the ignominy of failing to produce novels." ~ Thomas Keneally
35. "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
36. "Era un vers din Talmud: "Cel care salveaza o singura via?a, salveaza întreaga lume." ~ Thomas Keneally
37. "Lista este via?a. De jur-împrejurul marginilor ei scorojite se deschide prapastia." ~ Thomas Keneally
38. "The dogs were really keening now, like Irish widows." ~ Thomas Keneally
39. "Tout le monde voulait être dans le coup ce jour-là. Car, ce jour-là, on allait écrire l'Histoire avec un grand H. Il y avait eu un ghetto à Cracovie pendant plus de sept siècles, et voici qu'à la fin de la journée, ou au plus tard le lendemein, ces sept siècles ne seraient plus qu'une rumeur, et Cracovie serait enfin fiduciare (débarrassée des juifs)." ~ Thomas Keneally
40. "Le parti national-socialiste avait fait un fameux cadeau à ces SS-là : ils pouvaient marcher au combat sans aucun risque physique, décrocher les honneurs sans avoir à entendre siffler les balles. L'impunité psychologique était plus difficile à atteindre. Tous les officiers SS avaient des camarades qui s'étaient suicidés. Le haut commandment avait pondu des circulaires pour dénoncer ces pertes futiles : il fallait être simple d'esprit pour croire que les juifs, parce qu'ils n'avaient pas de fusils, ne possédaient pas d'armes d'un autre calibre : des armes sociales, économiques et politiques. En fait, le juif était armé jusqu'aux dents. Trempez votre caractère dans l'acier, soulignaient les circulaires, car l'enfant juif est une bombe à retardement culturelle, la femme juive, un tissu biologique de toutes les trahisons, le mâle juif, un ennemi plus implacable encore qu'aucun Russe ne saurait l'être. (ch. 20)" ~ Thomas Keneally
41. "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
42. "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
43. "He manifested a resolution which amounted to sternness." ~ Thomas Keneally
44. "Personal finances are like people's personal health, crucial and tragic to the sufferer but tedious to the listener." ~ Thomas Keneally

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A noble heart is a window to find an open mind."
Author: Anuj Somany

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