Best 39 quotes of Thomas Keneally on MyQuotes

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Coitus is random, children are definite.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Personal finances are like people’s personal health, crucial and tragic to the sufferer but tedious to the listener.

Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don't.

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.

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.

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

The List is Life.

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

Though, as he was torn into a pink upper air, she was a good craft to ride in, for her belly was firm and her breasts enabled a flying man good hold and emotions of heady safety. . . . Steering her peasant tits he bounded off stars.

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

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.

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.

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.

No olvidamos las penurias de Egipto, no olvidamos a Haman, no olvidamos a Hitler. Así como no olvidamos a los injustos, no olvidamos a los justos. Recordemos pues a Oskar Schindler.

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

Oskar cumplía treinta y siete años, y acababa de abrir una botella de coñac. Sobre su escritorio había un telegrama de una planta de montaje de armamentos situada cerca de Brno. Decía que las granadas antitanques de Oskar estaban tan mal hechas que no soportaban uno solo de los controles de calidad. Estaban mal calibradas, y estallaban durante los ensayos porque no habían sido templadas a la temperatura adecuada. Oskar parecía extasiado con el telegrama. Lo empujó hacia Stern y Pemper para que lo leyeran. Pemper recuerda que dijo una de sus extravagancias: —Es el mejor regalo de cumpleaños que podía haber recibido. Ahora sé que mis productos no pueden matar a ningún pobre infortunado.

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.

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.

Quien salva una sola vida, salva al mundo entero.

The dogs were really keening now, like Irish widows.

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

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).