Thomas Keneally Quotes

Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The List is Life.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Coitus is random, children are definite.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.