Thomas Keneally > Quotes

“Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don't”
― Thomas Keneally

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“The List is Life.", Schindler's List”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“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

“Oskar knew people would catch that trolley anyhow. Doors closed, no stops, machine guns on walls—it wouldn’t matter. Humans were incurable that way. People would try to get off it, someone’s loyal Polish maid with a parcel of sausage. And people would try to get on, some fast-moving athletic young man like Leopold Pfefferberg with a pocketful of diamonds or Occupation złoty or a message in code for the partisans. People responded to any slim chance, even if it was an outside one, its doors locked shut, moving fast between mute walls.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“Vina e un vis, mila e singura realitate.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“Quien salva una sola vida, salva al mundo entero.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“To write a novel is always to go naked, whatever you're writing about. You always reveal yourself.”
― Thomas Keneally

“Don’t kill yourself on the fence, Clara,” the woman urged her. “If you do that, you’ll never know what happened to you.” It has always been the most powerful of answers to give to the intending suicide. Kill yourself and you’ll never find out how the plot ends. Clara did not have any vivid interest in the plot. But somehow the answer was adequate. She turned around. When she got back to her barracks, she felt more troubled than when she’d set out to look for the fence. But her Cracow friend had—by her reply—somehow cut her off from suicide as an option.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List

“It was a morning of gruesome cold — minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit) says Stern. Even the exact Biberstein says that it was at least minus 20 degrees (minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit). Poldek Pfefferberg was summoned from his bunk, fetched his welding gear, and went out to the snowy siding to cut open the doors iced hard as iron. He too heard the unearthly complaints from within.
It is hard to describe what they saw when the doors were at last opened. In each car, a pyramid of frozen corpses, their limbs madly contorted, occupied the centre of the floor. The hundred or more still living stank awesomely, were seared black by the cold, were skeletal. Not one of them would be found to weigh more than 34 kilos.”
― 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: A Memoir

“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, Schindler's List

“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, Schindler's List

“Righteous Person, this title being a peculiarly Israeli honor based on an ancient tribal assumption that in the mass of Gentiles, the God of Israel would always provide a leavening of just men.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List

“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, Schindler’s List

“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

“He [Rabbi Menasha Levartov] 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

“Lista este viața. De jur-împrejurul marginilor ei scorojite se deschide prăpastia.”
― Thomas Keneally

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

“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, Schindler's List

“Schindler shook his head, and she thought it was too glib an encouragement to her to hope. Suddenly, the good cloth and the pampered flesh of Herr Schindler were a provocation. "For God's sake, Herr Direktor, I see things. We were up on the roof on Monday, chipping off the ice, me and young Lisiek. And we saw the Herr Commandant come out of the front door and down the steps by the patio, right below us. And, there on the steps, he drew his gun and shot a woman who was passing. A woman carrying a bundle. Through the throat. Just a woman on her way somewhere. You know. She didn't seem fatter or thinner or slower or faster than anyone else. I couldn't guess what she'd done. The more you see of the Herr Commandant, the more you see that there's no set of rules you can keep to. You can't say to yourself, If I allow these rules, I'll be safe. . . .”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“If Frau Rasch, in the last and fullest days of her husband’s power in Brno, had idly—during a party, say; a musical recital at the castle—gazed into the core of the diamond that had come to her from Oskar Schindler, she would have seen reflected there the worst incubus from her own dreams and her Führer’s. An armed Marxist Jew.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“Now, even if he and Dr B made their decision, D didn't know if he had the rigour to feed the cyanide to the ill, or to watch someone else do it and maintain a professional disposition. It was absurdley like the argument in one's youth, about whether you should approach a girl you were infatuated with. And when you'd decide, it still counted for nothing. The act still had to be faced.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“Principle is principle, of course, and terror on a gray morning is another thing.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“Tout le monde voulait être dans le coup ce jour-là. Car, ce jour-là, on allait écrire l'Histoire avec un grand H. Il y avait eu un ghetto à Cracovie pendant plus de sept siècles, et voici qu'à la fin de la journée, ou au plus tard le lendemein, ces sept siècles ne seraient plus qu'une rumeur, et Cracovie serait enfin fiduciare (débarrassée des juifs).”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List