Quotes from Thomas Keneally

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

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.

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

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.

Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.

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.

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.

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.", Schindler's List

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.

Vina e un vis, mila e singura realitate.

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

Quien salva una sola vida, salva al mundo entero.

He [Rabbi Menasha Levartov] 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 taste one gets of death in dreams I find more penetrating and atmospheric than the ordinary fear one might suffer while awake.

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

The moral universe had not so much decayed here. It had been inverted, like some black hole, under the pressure of all the earth's malice—a place where tribes and histories were sucked in and vaporized, and language flew inside out. The underground chambers were named "disinfection cellars," the aboveground chambers "bathhouses

El problema es que se recuerda esta lista con una intensidad tal que su mismo ardor confunde los hechos. La lista era un bien absoluto. La lista era la vida. Más allá de sus márgenes se abría el abismo.

Years later, one woman from those lines, remembering the morning, would face a German television crew and attempt to explain it. "He was our father, he was our mother, he was our only faith. He never let us down.

High Europe always played at ethnic contempt because it was High Europe, and so had the strength, the authority, to make the racial rules. We great unwashed of the outer world, on the coasts of new continents, though we might ourselves have behaved atrociously to indigenes, were baffled by the determination with which Europe returned to the frenzies of racial myth. Nice boys and not-so-nice boys took up the theme, put on the uniform, did the dirty work.

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.

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

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