9 Quotes & Sayings By Thomas Keneally

Thomas Keneally was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1940. He grew up in Sydney and attended its famous Boys High School before reading law at the University of Sydney. In 1965 he published his first book, a collection of short stories, The Boy from Bondi. Keneally's second novel, Schindler's Ark , was published in 1982 and won the Booker Prize Read more

Other works include The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith , The Playmaker , and Schindler's List . He served as Australia's consul-general in Los Angeles from 1987 to 1993, and has been a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley since 1995.

Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.
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Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire. Thomas Keneally
The taste one gets of death in dreams I find...
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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
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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
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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
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Personal finances are like people’s personal health, crucial and tragic to the sufferer but tedious to the listener. Thomas Keneally
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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
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The dogs were really keening now, like Irish widows. Thomas Keneally
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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