Thomas Michael Keneally
Thomas Michael Keneally is an Australian novelist, playwright, essayist and actor. He is best known for his non-fiction novel Schindler’s Ark, the story of Oskar Schindler’s rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, which won the Booker Prize in 1982. (Thomas Keneally Quotes)
“But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn’t do as much harm as is claimed-and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish-is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative. ”
Thomas Keneally
Searching for Schindler
“Coitus is random, children are definite.”
Thomas Keneally
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
“He manifested a resolution which amounted to sternness.”
Thomas Keneally
American Scoundrel
“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
Schindler’s List
“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
Searching for Schindler
“I believe we can discern the difference of a wise man momentarily giving way to intemperate emotion,” said my father, “and a fool reveling in malice.”
Thomas Keneally
Napoleon’s Last Island
“In a fallen world, it was hard to do unambiguous good.”
Thomas Keneally
Crimes of the Father
“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
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
“In this city he kept house with his German mistress and maintained a long affair with his Polish secretary.”
Thomas Keneally
Schindler’s List
“It is a sweet thing to outstrip a father whom you haven’t forgiven.”
Thomas Keneally
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.”
Thomas Keneally
Schindler’s List
“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 Quotes)
Thomas Keneally
Schindler’s List
“Now that I was a novelist, I could not face the ignominy of failing to produce novels.”
Thomas Keneally
Searching for Schindler
“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
Searching for Schindler
“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. ”
Thomas Keneally
Searching for Schindler
“Personal finances are like people’s personal health, crucial and tragic to the sufferer but tedious to the listener.”
Thomas Keneally
Searching for Schindler
“Principle is principle, of course, and terror on a gray morning is another thing.”
Thomas Keneally
Schindler’s List
“She yawns for men and not with her mouth. She weeps for men and not with her eyes. She drinks men down, she is a cave for men.”
Thomas Keneally
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
“Sometimes, Freud argued, people need a history enema.”
Thomas Keneally
The Daughters of Mars
“The dogs were really keening now, like Irish widows.”
Thomas Keneally
Victim of the Aurora
“The more orthodox of the ghetto had a slogan – ‘An hour of life is still life’.”
Thomas Keneally
Schindler’s List
“The principle was, death should not be entered like some snug harbor. It should be an unambiguous refusal to surrender.”
Thomas Keneally
Schindler’s List
“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
Searching for Schindler
“The truest crime remaining to him to commit was the waste of love. It should be bequeathed, as land is.”
Thomas Keneally
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
“They permitted witnesses, such witnesses as the red toddler, because they believed the witnesses all would perish too.” (Thomas Keneally Quotes)
Thomas Keneally
Schindler’s List
“We humbly beg your kind applause,” murmured Mary Brenham, with a creative frown that reminded Ralph of Betsey Alicia and made him sharply aware there was nothing that moved him like a cloud of intellection on a desired face.”
Thomas Keneally
The Playmaker
“Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.”
Thomas Keneally
Schindler’s List
“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
Schindler’s List
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