Education Quote by Thomas Keneally

Keneally’s sentence catches the reader in the hinge between vocation and obligation, where desire doesn’t disappear so much as get audited. “Definitely” plants a flag: the writerly identity is already settled internally. Then comes the turn - “but” - and with it a distinctly Catholic arithmetic of debt and repayment. Education isn’t framed as liberation; it’s “resources” that have been “used up,” language that makes learning sound like rations in wartime. The subtext is guilt with a ledger: if your community invested in you, you owe them a life they recognize as legitimate.

The genius of the line is how it makes duty feel both noble and claustrophobic. He doesn’t say he was called to the priesthood; he says he “felt a duty” to the church and “my parents,” pairing institution and family as a single moral gravity. That coupling matters. It suggests the church’s authority isn’t abstract; it’s braided into the intimate economy of pleasing, repaying, not disappointing. Even the modesty of “felt” signals an emotion he can’t quite defend as pure conviction, more pressure system than revelation.

Contextually, it sits inside a familiar mid-20th-century story of upward mobility mediated by religious institutions, especially for working- and middle-class Catholics. The priesthood becomes a socially approved endpoint for a bright kid who’s been sponsored. Keneally’s later career as a novelist reads, against this backdrop, like an escape that still carries the stamp of the world he tried to pay back.