Top 60 Thomas Keneally Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.”

— Thomas Keneally

2. “Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don’t.”

— Thomas Keneally

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

— Thomas Keneally

4. “Quien salva una sola vida, salva al mundo entero.”

— Thomas Keneally

5. “The more orthodox of the ghetto had a slogan – “An hour of life is still life.”

— Thomas Keneally

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

— Thomas Keneally

7. “Coitus is random, children are definite.”

— Thomas Keneally

8. “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

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

— Thomas Keneally

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

— Thomas Keneally

11. “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

12. “Beyond this day,” he would claim, “no thinking person could fail to see what would happen. I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system.”

— Thomas Keneally

13. “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?”

— Thomas Keneally

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

— Thomas Keneally

15. “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.”

— Thomas Keneally

16. “To the memory of Oskar Schindler, and to Leopold Pfefferberg who by zeal and persistence caused this book to be written.”

— Thomas Keneally

17. “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

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

— Thomas Keneally

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

— Thomas Keneally

20. “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

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

— Thomas Keneally

22. “Now that I was a novelist, I could not face the ignominy of failing to produce novels.”

— Thomas Keneally

23. “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.”

— Thomas Keneally

24. “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

25. “Principle is principle, of course, and terror on a gray morning is another thing.”

— Thomas Keneally

26. “It’s only when you abandon your ambitions that they become possible.”

— Thomas Keneally

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

— Thomas Keneally

28. “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.”

— Thomas Keneally

29. “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.”

— Thomas Keneally

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

— Thomas Keneally

31. “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.”

— Thomas Keneally

32. “They permitted witnesses, such witnesses as the red toddler, because they believed the witnesses all would perish too.”

— Thomas Keneally

33. “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

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

— Thomas Keneally

35. “It is a sweet thing to outstrip a father whom you haven’t forgiven.”

— Thomas Keneally

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

— Thomas Keneally

37. “Blancke’s concept of “health” was as eccentric as that of any doctor in the SS. He had rid the prison clinic of the chronically ill by injecting benzine into their bloodstreams. These injections could not by anyone’s definition be called mercy killings. The patient was seized by convulsions which ended in a choking death after a quarter of an hour.”

— Thomas Keneally

38. “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

39. “To write these things now is to state the commonplaces of history. But to find them out in 1942, to have them break upon you from a June sky, was to suffer a fundamental shock, a derangement in that area of the brain in which stable ideas about humankind and its possibilities are kept.”

— Thomas Keneally

40. “Later in the journey, Olek turned his head in against Henry’s arm and began to weep. He would not at first tell Rosner what was wrong. When he did speak at last, it was to say that he was sorry to drag Henry off to Auschwitz. “To die just because of me,” he said. Henry could have tried to soothe him by telling lies, but it wouldn’t have worked. All the children knew about the gas. They grew petulant when you tried to deceive them.”

— Thomas Keneally

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

— Thomas Keneally

42. “To write a novel is always to go naked, whatever you’re writing about. You always reveal yourself.”

— Thomas Keneally

43. “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.”

— Thomas Keneally

44. “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

45. “Much later, in terms uncharacteristic of jovial Herr Schindler, Cracow’s favorite party guest, Zablocie’s big spender, in terms, that is, which showed – behind the playboy facade – an implacable judge, Oskar would lay special weight on this day. “Beyond this day,” he would claim, “no thinking person could fail to see what would happen. I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system.”

— Thomas Keneally

46. “In a fallen world, it was hard to do unambiguous good.”

— Thomas Keneally

47. “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.”

— Thomas Keneally

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

— Thomas Keneally

49. “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

50. “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.”

— Thomas Keneally