82 Quotes by Thomas Keneally

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

There were many indications from history, Frank proposed, that threatened races generally outbred the genocides. The phallus was faster than the gun.

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

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

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.