Thomas Keneally quotes

Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire. (Thomas Keneally)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas Keneally

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 times like these, he said, it must be hard for the churches to go on telling people that their Heavenly Father cared about the death of even a single sparrow. He'd hate to be a priest, Herr Schindler said, in an era like this, when life did not have the value of a packet of cigarettes. Stern agreed but suggested, in the spirit of the discussion, that the Biblical reference Herr Schindler had made could be summed up by a Talmudic verse which said that he who saves the life of one man, saves the entire world.

Thomas Keneally

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

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

And I was very interested in the priesthood.

Thomas Keneally

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

Thomas Keneally

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