Leadership Quote by Thomas Keneally

Hesitation does a lot of heavy lifting here. Keneally isnt delivering a polished conversion narrative; hes letting the seams show, and thats the point. The repeated "um" reads like a mind replaying a fork in the road, not to dramatize it but to keep it honest. It suggests a speaker who still feels the gravitational pull of the path he declined, or at least the cultural machinery around it: vocation as destiny, priesthood as a socially legible form of seriousness, celibacy as both sacrifice and performance.

The most revealing clause is "though I could probably manage it". He frames celibacy not as an impossible burden but as an achievable discipline, which undercuts any melodramatic tale of temptation. That modest claim also implies a quieter indictment: the issue wasnt capability, it was desire and identity. "Manage" is the vocabulary of endurance, not calling. Hes separating moral stamina from life purpose, refusing the idea that suffering is automatically meaningful.

Context matters: a mid-20th-century Australian Catholic world where priesthood carried status, certainty, and institutional authority. To leave wasnt just a career pivot; it was a social rupture, a renegotiation with family, community, and a church that often treated doubt as failure. The finality of "ultimately I left" lands because its blunt against all that verbal stalling. After the ums, theres one clean action. The subtext is less about rebellion than about choosing authorship over obedience: stepping out of a script and into the messy freedom of writing ones own.