Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Keneally

“Certainly muscular” is Keneally’s sly little knife: a compliment that sounds harmless until you hear the pause around it. The line’s throat-clearing “Um” and the hedging “what I found though” perform a kind of witness-testimony minimalism. He’s not launching an accusation; he’s showing you the shape of a memory he can’t quite—or won’t quite—state plainly. That restraint is the tell.

In the context of Irish-Australian Catholic schooling, the Christian Brothers weren’t just teachers; they were embodiments of authority. Calling them “muscular” lands as physical description and as power analysis. It flags a regime where discipline is not merely moral or intellectual but bodily, enforced by men whose strength is part of the institution’s toolkit. The word “certainly” adds courtroom certainty, as if this is the one safe fact to declare when the more volatile facts are still smoldering offstage.

Keneally, a novelist attuned to how institutions narrate themselves, chooses an oddly neutral adjective to let the reader do the moral math. Muscularity can be admirable in a sports story; in a religious-educational setting, it carries an implicit menace. The subtext: whatever else they were—pious, dedicated, respectable—they were also physically imposing, and that mattered. The line works because it mimics the way people circle trauma or complicity: understatement as self-protection, irony as a pressure valve, and a single concrete detail standing in for everything that can’t be neatly summarized in polite company.