Thomas Keneally Quotes

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

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.

Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.

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

And I was very interested in the priesthood.

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.

We all have to expect to lose something in times like these.

From November 1st, said Hans Frank, it would be possible for the Germans of Cracow to breathe 'good German air', to walk abroad without seeing the streets and lanes 'crawling with Jews'.

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.

That was travel, she supposed. A dance across surfaces to see the face of everything and learn the meaning of very little.

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

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.

The more orthodox of the ghetto had a slogan - 'An hour of life is still life.

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

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.

She yawns for men and not with her mouth. She weeps for men and not with her eyes. She drinks men down, she is a cave for me.

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.

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

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.

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.

His wife, Emilie, still lived, without any financial help from him, in her little house in San Vicente, south of Buenos Aires. She lives there at the time of the writing of this book. As she was in Brinnlitz, she is a figure of quiet dignity. In a documentary made by German television in 1973, she spoke - without any of the abandoned wife's bitterness or sense of grievance - about Oskar and Brinnlitz, about her own behavior in Brinnlitz. Perceptively, she remarked that Oskar had done nothing astounding before the war and had been unexceptional since. He was fortunate, therefore, that in that short fierce era between 1939 and 1945 he had met people who summoned forth his deeper talents.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

He manifested a resolution which amounted to sternness.

To write a novel is always to go naked, whatever you're writing about. You always reveal yourself.

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.

Lower ways of life give way to higher.

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.

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.

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?

It was the first time Oskar had seen this juxtaposition of humans and cattle cars, and it was a greater shock than hearing of it.

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.

As Wulkan entered the mess with his wrenches, he saw above the door the inscription, Für Juden und Hunde Eintritt Verboten - Entrance forbidden to Jews and dogs.

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

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.

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

It is a sweet thing to outstrip a father whom you haven't forgiven.

The dogs were really keening now, like Irish widows.