Top 44 Thomas Keneally Quotes
#1. And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s.
Thomas Keneally
#2. 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
#3. But I was also a brat. I used to belong to a gang that went looking for fights with other gangs.
Thomas Keneally
#4. Now that I was a novelist, I could not face the ignominy of failing to produce novels.
Thomas Keneally
#5. 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
#7. The principle was, death should not be entered like some snug harbor. It should be an unambiguous refusal to surrender.
Thomas Keneally
#8. 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
#10. Personal finances are like people's personal health, crucial and tragic to the sufferer but tedious to the listener.
Thomas Keneally
#11. I was never any good at cricket thought I love it as a, as a sort of mystery.
Thomas Keneally
#12. 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
#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. The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All round its cramped margins lies the gulf.
Thomas Keneally
#15. 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
#16. The truest crime remaining to him to commit was the waste of love. It should be bequeathed, as land is.
Thomas Keneally
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Um, what I found though about the Christian Brothers is this: that they were certainly muscular.
Thomas Keneally
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Sometimes tyrants do away with the necessity of satire by imposing absurdity themselves.
Thomas Keneally
#24. 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
#26. In a way Australia is like Catholicism. The company is sometimes questionable and the landscape is grotesque. But you always come back.
Thomas Keneally
#27. Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don't
Thomas Keneally
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. And I think my sexuality was heavily repressed by the church, by the, you know, the design of the mortal sins.
Thomas Keneally
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#38. Thomas was my true name but everyone knew me as Mick, except my mother, who knew me as definitely Michael.
Thomas Keneally
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. It's only when you abandon your ambitions that they become possible.
Thomas Keneally
#44. He manifested a resolution which amounted to sternness.
Thomas Keneally
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