Thomas Keneally Quotes

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.

Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.

The List is Life.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

Coitus is random, children are definite.

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

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.

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.