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Thomas Keneally QUOTES

Thomas Keneally QUOTES

1 " Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire. "

― Thomas Keneally , Schindler's List

2 " 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: A Memoir

3 " 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: A Memoir

4 " The dogs were really keening now, like Irish widows. "

― Thomas Keneally , Victim of the Aurora

5 " 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: A Memoir

6 " Now that I was a novelist, I could not face the ignominy of failing to produce novels. "

― Thomas Keneally , Searching for Schindler: A Memoir

7 " But re-reading Voss also demonstrates again that although White wasn't 'a nice man', and indeed was—perhaps rightly—scathingly dismissive of my and other Australian writers' work and origins unless they were his friends, he was a genius, and Voss one of the finest works of the modernist era and of the past century. "

― Thomas Keneally

8 " Quien salva una sola vida, salva al mundo entero. "

― Thomas Keneally , Schindler's List

9 " 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. "

― Thomas Keneally , Schindler's List

10 " No olvidamos las penurias de Egipto, no olvidamos a Haman, no olvidamos a Hitler. Así como no olvidamos a los injustos, no olvidamos a los justos. Recordemos pues a Oskar Schindler. "

― Thomas Keneally , Schindler's List

11 " Oskar cumplía treinta y siete años, y acababa de abrir una botella de coñac. Sobre su escritorio había un telegrama de una planta de montaje de armamentos situada cerca de Brno. Decía que las granadas antitanques de Oskar estaban tan mal hechas que no soportaban uno solo de los controles de calidad. Estaban mal calibradas, y estallaban durante los ensayos porque no habían sido templadas a la temperatura adecuada. Oskar parecía extasiado con el telegrama. Lo empujó hacia Stern y Pemper para que lo leyeran. Pemper recuerda que dijo una de sus extravagancias:
—Es el mejor regalo de cumpleaños que podía haber recibido. Ahora sé que mis productos no pueden matar a ningún pobre infortunado. "

― Thomas Keneally , Schindler's List

12 " Coitus is random, children are definite. "

― Thomas Keneally , The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

13 " Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don't "

― Thomas Keneally

14 " 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

15 " 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: A Memoir

16 " 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: A Memoir

17 " 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

18 " The List is Life.", Schindler's List "

― Thomas Keneally , Schindler's List

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

― Thomas Keneally , Searching for Schindler: A Memoir

20 " 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