Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Keneally

A line this bare is doing a novelist's favorite trick: letting absence carry the weight. "And I was very interested in the priesthood" arrives like a casual aside, but the phrasing is calibrated to suggest a whole biographical fork in the road. The opening "And" implies continuation, as if we're catching Keneally mid-story, not at the start of a confession. It makes the interest feel less like a dramatic conversion narrative and more like one option among many in a young man's life - which is precisely how serious vocations often begin, quietly, before they become myth.

The key word is "interested". Not "called", not "saved", not even "drawn". It's secular, almost studious, the language of someone looking at the priesthood as an institution as much as a spiritual destiny. Coming from a novelist, that matters: priests are custodians of story, ritual, secrecy, authority. To be "interested" in that world is to be interested in how narratives are manufactured and maintained, how guilt and grace become plot engines, how communities police belonging.

Contextually, Keneally's Catholic background and later public distance from clerical life shadow the sentence with irony. It reads like the setup to an untold counterfactual: the life he didn't lead, the voice he didn't adopt, the obedience he didn't accept. The subtext isn't piety so much as an early fascination with moral power - and with the dramatic possibilities of a system that asks humans to speak for God.