Confessional Quotes

A distinction must be made between that writing which enables us to hold on to life even as we are clinging to old hurts and wounds and that writing which offers to us a space where we are able to confront reality in such a way that we live more fully. Such writing is not an anchor that we mistakenly cling to so as not to drown. It is writing that truly rescues, that enables us to reach the shore, to recover. ~ Bell Hooks

It's a funny thing that the ritual is more powerful than the killing. What's tied to the earth is less important than what's tied to the heavens. You're crosser about my language in the confessional than you are about the fact that I killed a man. ~ Lisa McInerney

The new evangelization ... begins in the confessional. ~ Pope Benedict XVI

We dance. Sweet, downcast, through-the-lashes-glances bely every beating she got at thirteen, every lash of the tongue from her dad at fourteen, every heroin high that let her out for awhile, every hour and day she had to be tough.

She is so natural and soft. Her shoulders are down, hips loose and swinging as we close together. I swear I'm growing chest hair just looking at her. I've been a boy in public before, but I've never seen her like this. That's it exactly; I haven't seen her at all, except in glimpses, in half-confessional role-play sex. And here she is - pressed tight against my chest, hips grinding against my crotch to the bass bump of the music. Her thigh along mine is electric heaven. Two drag queens cannot decide whether we are breeders or in drag. I stroke my mascara-made mustache at them - but none of it matters with hands in suede and the way she smiles. ~ Various

Not that there is anything wrong with confessional songwriting, there are plenty of people that do that I admire. I think it is great, it just isn't how I do things. ~ Zooey Deschanel

One of the problems with a lot of "confessional" writing is that it starts and stops with the confessional and doesn't really tie the "I" into a "we" at all. I'm still surprised at how mad critics get at that kind of confessional writing. ~ Kiese Laymon

Stick me in a confessional and ask the question: Sir, if you had the authority, would you forbid smoking in America? You'd get a solemn and contrite, Yes. ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

Come together. Twins Forever. ~ Tegan Quin

We missed a lot of church, so the music is our confessional. ~ Big Boi

I find it relatively easy to keep my clothes on because I don't really feel like taking them off. It's not an urge I have. For me, 'risky' is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is. That's putting myself out there, maybe even more than taking my shirt off. ~ Taylor Swift

Interestingly, the historic case of 1868 in England that first defined obscenity-known among lawyers as the Hicklin decision- evolved out of the prosecution of a pamphlet describing how priests were often so sexually aroused while hearing women's confessions that they sometimes masturbated and even copulated with their repentant subjects in the confessional. ~ Gay Talese

In no issue of foreign policy could her prevarication and indecisiveness be said to have led to disastrous consequences for her country. On the international stage there was no better survivor. At home her achievement can only be judged with hindsight. A combination of good sense and longevity settled the church, and it was no fault of hers that confessional issues became so divisive forty years after her death. She gave her country pride, and set its commercial development on a course that was eventually to be spectacularly successful; for that she deserves more credit than she is usually given. ~ David Loades

Maybe I should, I don't know leave? Because this is starting to sound like one of those reality shows I don't want to be in. Maybe you guys want to take turns in the confessional booth. ~ Rachel Caine

The way I work, I'm not a confessional singer-songwriter. ~ Andrew Bird

I didn't really like confessional poetry or things. They seemed sort of dated to me, or just corny. ~ Stephen Malkmus

Sharp disaster in a fresh new coma
Was it worth it when it was over ~ Dashboard Confessional

A priest cannot acknowledge the sin or the sinner outside of the confessional. ~ Julie Garwood

If you'd told me even a year before ... that I'd wind up whispering my sins in the confessional or on my knees saying the rosary, I would've laughed myself cockeyed. More likely pastime?Pole dancer. International spy. Drug mule. Assassin.
I drive under a sky black as graphite to meet my new spiritual director ... a bulky Franciscan nun named Sister Margaret, patiently going blind behind fish-tank glasses that magnify her eyes like goggles. ~ Mary Karr

Most of the songs are, in a roundabout way, actually addressed to myself, there's a certain aspect of the songs that's very confessional, very unadulterated ... It was a very unfettered, spiritual experience. ~ Alanis Morissette

They sell courage of a sort in the taverns. And another sort, though not for sale, a man can find in the confessional. Try the alehouses and the churches, Hugh. In either a man can be quiet and think. ~ Ellis Peters

The hazard of confessional books is how fast the world moves on while they're written. ~ Tina Brown

Emo: e-mo 1. A much-maligned, mocked, and misunderstood term for melodic, expressive, and confessional punk rock. ~ Andy Greenwald

He'd always had a joke for Francis in the confessional, a 'sin' that could be counted on to cause a young priest to grin behind the safety of the wooden shield. Bless me, Father, for I put tuna in the chicken salad. ~ Kristin Hannah

What will you do if you win the Scorpio Races?"

I look into the bucket.

"Oh, I'll buy fourteen dresses and build a road and name it after myself and try one of everything at Palsson's."

Though I don't quite look up, I can still feel his gaze on me. It's a heavy thing, this look of his. He says, "What's the real answer?"

But when I try to think of a real answer, it reminds me of Father Mooneyham saying that Gabe had sat in the confessional and cried, and it makes me think of how, no matter what happens in the races, the best option still has Gabe sailing away in a boat. So I snap, "Do you think I just turn my secrets out for everyone?"

He is unfazed. "I didn't know they were secrets," he says. "Or I wouldn't have asked."

It makes me feel ungenerous, since he'd answered so honestly. "I'm sorry," I say. "My mother always said that I was born out of a bottle of vinegar instead of born from a womb and that she and my father bathed me in sugar for three days to wash it off. I try to behave, but I always go back to the vinegar." When Dad was in one of his rare, fanciful moods, he told guests that the pixies left me on the doorstep because I bit their fingers too often. My favorite was always when Mum said that before I was born, it rained for seven days and seven nights solid, and when she went out into the yard to ask the sky what it was weeping for, I dropped out of the clouds at her feet and the sun came out. I alw ~ Maggie Stiefvater

All discourses and disciplines proceed from commitments and beliefs that are ultimately religious in nature. No scientific discourse (whether natural science or social science) simply discloses to us the facts of reality to which theology must submit; rather, every discourse is, in some sense, religious. The playing field has been leveled. Theology is most persistently postmodern when it rejects a lingering correlational false humility and instead speaks unapologetically from the the primacy of Christian revelation and the church's confessional language. ~ James K.A. Smith

It seems to me that although they have a respectable sales pitch, this business of a priest having the power to let bygones be bygones and grant us absolution from our scandals is all just one gigantic scam to con loads of money off a haunted and gullible public. ~ Karl Wiggins

I long for the day I no longer long for him. ~ Franki Fiori

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster? ~ C. Day Lewis

A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment. The transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence. ~ P.D. James

Waking up breaks my heart.
Getting dressed breaks my arms.
Joining the crowd breaks my legs.
Letting someone in ... does me in. ~ Casey Renee Kiser

Winnowing is more like a trip to the confessional ... transparent & vulnerable without being sentimental. These songs have elements that are more like prayers & pleas for faith. They're questionings and wrangling in the dark about the journey. ~ Bill Mallonee

Sometimes, instructing children in the old days, he had been asked by some black lozenge-eyed Indian child, What is God like? and he would answer facilely with references to the father and the mother, or perhaps more ambitiously he would include brother and sister and try to give some idea of all loves and relationships combined in an immense and yet personal passion....But at the centre of his own faith there always stood the convincing mystery - that we were made in God's image. God was the parent, but He was also the policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge. Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before bullets in a prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex. He would sit in the confessional and hear the complicated dirty ingenuities which God's image had thought out, and God's image shook now, up and down on the mule's back, with the yellow teeth sticking out over the lower lip, and god's image did its despairing act of rebellion with Maria in the hut among the rats. He said, Do you feel better now? Not so cold, eh? Or so hot? and pressed his hand with a kind of driven tenderness upon the shoulders of God's image.

Such a lot of beauty. Saints talk about the beauty of suffering. Well, we are not saints, you and I. Suffering to us is just ugly. Stench and crowding and pain. That is beautiful in that corner - to them. It needs a lot of learning to see things with a saint's eye: a s ~ Graham Greene

You may spoil the Gospel by substitution. You have only to withdraw from the eyes of the sinner the grand object which the Bible proposes to faith, - Jesus Christ; and to substitute another object in His place, - the Church, the Ministry, the Confessional, Baptism or the Lord's Supper, - and the mischief is done. Substitute anything for Christ, and the Gospel is totally spoiled! Do this, either directly or indirectly, and your religion ceases to be Evangelical. ~ J.C. Ryle

I think now there's much more of a confessional culture. That's not my bag. I come from a slightly older school of thought: 'give 'em nothin.' You don't plead guilty. ~ Ben Mendelsohn

By inner experience I understand that which one usually calls mystical experience: the states of ecstasy, of rapture, at least of meditated emotion. But I am thinking less of confessional experience, to which one has had to adhere up to now, that of an experience laid bare, free of ties, even of an origin, of any confession whatever. This is why I don't like the word mystical. ~ Georges Bataille

I open doors, I close doors," he wrote. He loved no one, he loved everyone. He loved sex, he hated sex. Life is a lie, truth is a lie. His thoughts ended with a healing wound. "I stand naked when I draw. God holds my hand and we sing together." His manifesto as an artist. I let the confessional aspects fall away, and I accepted those words as a communion wafer. He had cast the line that would seduce me, ultimately bind us together. I folded the letter and put it back in the envelope, not knowing what would happen next. ~ Patti Smith

They say of us that we are an anti-Christian movement. They even say that I am an outspoken paganist ... I solemnly declare here, before the German public, that I stand on the basis of Christianity, but I declare just as solemnly that I will put down every attempt to introduce confessional matters into our Hitler Youth. ~ Baldur Von Schirach

I think all writing is necessarily autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and the less it tries to be confessional, the more likely it is that you're somehow sneaking the things you need to say in there. ~ John Darnielle

My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me. ~ Michael Pollan

Confessional poetry is, to my mind, more slippery than poems that are sloppily autobiographical; I find the confessional mode much more akin to dramatic monologue. ~ Cate Marvin

The seminaries have generally been so covetous of academic recognition, and so anxious for locus within the ethos and hierarchy of the university, that they have not noticed how alien and hostile those premises are to the peculiar vocation of the seminary. Thus the seminaries succumb to disseminating ideological renditions of the faith which demean the vitality of the biblical witness by engaging in endless classifications and comparisons of ideas. All this eschews commitment and precludes a confessional study of theology. ~ William Stringfellow

Memoir ... satisfies our need for gossip and intimacy, for testimony and confessional, and in this world of spin, offers a truthful account of what it means to succeed or fail, to love and lose, to break your heart and mend it again. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Look at it this way - a totem pole is just a decorated tree. My work is a confessional. ~ Louise Bourgeois

finally it became obvious that my talents lay with flies. That's a fate that takes some getting used to. Anyway, the hoverflies are only props. No, not only, but to some extent. Here and there, my story is about something else. Exactly what, I don't know. Some days I tell myself that my mission is to say something about the art and sometimes the bliss of limitation. And the legibility of landscape. Other days are more dismal. As if I were queueing in the rain outside confessional literature's nudist colony, mirrors everywhere, blue with cold. But ~ Fredrik Sjoberg

The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord's mercy motivates us to do better. ~ Pope Francis

At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all. ~ Mary Oliver

The duties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me that I wondered how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake them; and I was not surprised when he told me that the fathers of the Church had written books as thick as the Post Office Directory and as closely printed as the law notices in the newspaper, elucidating all these intricate questions. ~ James Joyce

Strange things happen on this earth: you can live a long while with someone and be on the friendliest of terms, and yet you'll never once talk openly with him, from the depths of your soul; while with someone else you may scarcely have met, at one glance, whether you to him or he to you, just as in a confessional, you'll blurt out the story of your life. ~ Ivan Turgenev

A catechism is simply a tool for teaching the fundamentals of the faith. Unlike a creed or confession, a catechism uses questions and answers. Many Protestant confessional traditions, like Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Reformed, have used catechisms for centuries. Initially, most catechisms were intended for children. ~ Kevin DeYoung

I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular. ~ Per Petterson

It was her work of art, her poem and her prayer, to repeat this story, low and precipitately, as if she were in the confessional. You felt that she came to it quite naturally, without transition, so completely did it posses her whenever they were alone. ~ Henri Barbusse

Really love him, I mean," Geilie persisted. "Not just to bed him; I know you want that, and he does too. They all do. But do you love him?"
Did I love him? Beyond the urges of the flesh? The hole had the dark anonymity of the confessional, and a soul on the verge of death had no time for lies.
"Yes," I said, and laid my head back on my knees.
It was silent in the hole for some time, and I hovered once more on the verge of sleep, when I heard her speak once more, as though to herself.
"So it's possible," she said thoughtfully. ~ Diana Gabaldon

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real. ~ Jeanette Winterson

A blog is neither a diary nor a journal. Many people think of blogging in relation to those two things, confessional or practical. It is neither but includes elements of both. ~ Lemn Sissay

Illness is a part of every human being's experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals. ~ Virginia Woolf

Cautiously, slowly, and hoping that God was too busy with other things to notice, our logic and lust would unravel quilts of Sunday morning sermons, catechism lessons, confessional admonitions, and parental warnings.
Such apprehensive behavior would often overflow into other activities. A devout Catholic would never completely open his Christmas gifts until August. Catholics also did very well on bomb squads.
By the time we got through all the wrappings, we would often discover that our virginity had simply melted away. Ask a non-Catholic when they lost their virginity and they recall a specific moment. Ask a Catholic the same question and they begin counting the years on their fingers. ~ John R. Powers

As he still groped for that one moment, Father Dowling began to think that the whole city for years had been whispering its story to him out of the darkness in snatches, in a huge confessional where he could not see the faces ... ~ Morley Callaghan

Let's face it, if what you do is good, then you have God's blessing anyway. And if what you do is bad, then a priest's blessing isn't going to make the slightest bit of difference ~ Karl Wiggins

Hey, we had a deal. Aren't you supposed to take off your clothes now?"
"It would only be pity sex," she said, in a mock confessional. "I won't insult you like that."
"Go ahead. Insult me. ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

There were once again believers, who this time were unwilling to work on Sundays. (They had introduced the five-and the six-day week.) And there were collective farmers sent up for sabotage because they refused to work on religious feast days, as had been their custom in the era of individual farms.
And, always, there were those who refused to become NKVD informers. (Among them were priests who refused to violate the secrecy of the confessional, for the Organs had very quickly discovered how useful had very quickly discovered how useful it was to learn the content of confessions - the only use they found for religion.)
And members of non-Orthodox sects were arrested on an ever-wider scale.
And the Big Solitaire game with the socialists went on and on. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Many of us are confessional giants but ethical midgets. ~ Mark Buchanan

She [Mary Maclane] is almost always referred to as "confessional." She has been referred to, several times, as the first blogger. Whereas her writing does not confess much - it is much more spiritual memoir than anything, or perhaps something akin to a mystic's courtly love, directed at the self. I am wondering what distinguishes writing as confessional…

I keep on feeling I prefer the latter-day MacLane, the diary she wrote while convalescing from scarlet fever back home in Butte, Montana, I, Mary MacLane, that Melville House is only publishing as an ebook. Mary MacLane melancholy, totally isolated. Feeling intense disquiet. Now in her early thirties, meditating on her whirlwind celebrity, in cities, feeling distanced from all that, but longing for it too. Obsessed with the Mary MacLane who stopped writing, or stopped publishing books, who was involved with the anarchist/bohemian crowd in Chicago, with the Dill Pickle, who died in poverty and obscurity on the South Side at the age of 48. I want to write about her, but I don't know how or why yet. ~ Kate Zambreno

People "confess" can be wildly different. I might go into the confessional and say, "Father, what is my obsession with miniatures?" ~ Matthea Harvey

As evidenced during my failed audition, I'm a thorough introvert who would completely hate living in a 'Real World' house. I would have taken my Ikea comforter to the confessional room and never come out. ~ Andrea Seigel

You have forgotten the doctrine of your own church, is it not so? The cross ... the bread and wine ... the confessional ... only symbols. Without faith, the cross is only wood, the bread baked wheat, the wine sour grapes. ~ Stephen King

In the PC(USA) Book of Confessions, A Brief Statement of Faith made explicit the equality of all people: "In sovereign love God created the world good and makes everyone equally in God's image, male and female, of every race and people, to live as one community."60 A Brief Statement of Faith also provided clear confessional warrant for the ordination of women, declaring that the Spirit "calls women and men to all the ministries of the Church. ~ Jack Rogers

As you know, there are several classes of truth. There are the truths that pour out on confessional blogs and YouTube channels. There are the supposed truths exposed in gossip magazines and on reality television, which everyone knows are just lies in truth clothing. Then there are the truths that show themselves only under ideal circumstances: like when you are talking deep into the night with a friend and you tell each other things you would never say if your defenses weren't broken down by salty snacks, sugary beverages, darkness, and a flood of words. There are the truths found in books or films when some writer puts exactly the right words together and it's like their pen turned sword and pierced you right through the heart. Truths like those are rare and getting rarer. ~ Susan Juby

The New Testament writers, even while writing the texts on love and forbearance that we are trying to understand and obey, condemn false prophets, expel the man who is sleeping with his step-mother, declare that it would be better for Judas Iscariot if he had not been born, assure readers that the evil of Alexander the metal-worker will be required of him, and solemnly warn of eternal judgement to come. Sometimes, of course, churches with right-wing passions use these same texts to bully their members unto unflagging submission to the local dictator. The threat of church discipline can degenerate into a form of manipulation, of spiritual abuse. Where, then, is the line to be drawn? To a postmodern relativist, any form of confessional discipline will seem nothing more than intolerant, manipulative abuse. From a Christian perspective, what lines must be drawn and why? How does Christian love work itself out in such cases? (p. 149). ~ D.A. Carson

There are many things that bother me. I know that I have never passed a man on the street that I liked - most of them giving off a kind of ether of disgust and stumbling and clay-eating, snot-eating grievance. I don't like the human race at all. this is my confessional, father, pass the wine. ~ Charles Bukowski

The Truth the Dead Know


For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in the stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Anne Sexton was a model who became a confessional poet, writing about intimate aspects of her life, after her doctor suggested that she take up poetry as a form of therapy. She studied under Robert Lowell at Boston University, where Sylvia Plath was one of her classmates. Sexton won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967, but later committed suicide via carbon monoxide poisoning. Topics she covered in her poems included adultery, masturbation, menstruation, abortion, despair and suicide. ~ Anne Sexton

It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional. ~ Thomas Pynchon

The confessional writer will treat her story like a wailing wall. She kneels, and her story spills out, messy, improper. It isn't a protest or even graffiti, but her story is an offering of things that she overlooked or notices that others have overlooked. She is in danger of exposure but she remembers when she lived in hiding and that was worse. She cannot turn back now because this is how life has spun out of her, part vexing passage and part prayer. ~ Patricia Hickman

CJ's peace was restored.
Momentarily.
"Oh shit shit shit," a woman said. Her voice rippled with the kind of panic CJ expected from the bride today, but her husky undertones were too low for her to be any of his female relatives.
Perhaps the confessional hadn't been a gift from God after all.
"If that's what you need to do, but not right now, please," CJ said.
Her shriek splintered his last hopes for peace. "Ohmigod!" his intruder gasped.
"Not generally, but hey, if that's what you want to call me, I'm game. ~ Jamie Farrell

She made herself ill remembering her last words to him, hearing them over and over as she carried her bucket up and down the stairs, as she ate her lonely soup, as she sat in the confessional before the priest.
"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned." She leaned on the partition, feeling the dampness at her forehead and her breast from the holy water's anointment. "It has been one month since my last confession."
"And what sins have you committed since then?" Father Marche's question was so familiar, his cadence always precisely the same, kind but tired, a little bored.
Violetta always gave her rote response: acts of laziness and selfishness, disobeying the prioress, taking the Lord's name in vain. Not today. Her words choked her. She could hardly get them out.
"I have lied to a friend."
Father looked at her through the grate. He'd never done that. "This weighs on you."
She nodded; tears spilled from her eyes. "It is unforgivable."
"Nothing is unforgivable with penance and contrition," he said with a kind of faith Violetta could not muster. He went on about Hail Marys; she said them aloud in a daze. He gave her absolution, but it did nothing to ease her mind or heart. As she left the confessional, she felt diseased by her own actions.
Mino thought she didn't care. But apart from music, he was the best thing in her life. ~ Lauren Kate

I live for the midnight info-dump. In fact, when I got up this morning I said to my cats, 'You know what's missing in my life? A late-night confessional to curl my toes. ~ Tilia Klebenov Jacobs

"Confessional poetry" is another one of those labels. It goes in and out of fashion. ~ Matthea Harvey

For me, 'risky' is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is. ~ Taylor Swift

Country music busts the wall between performer and audience. There's a connection because there's a vulnerability, a confessional quality, to so much of the songwriting. Those lyrics take you in. ~ Hunter Hayes

If you go back to all my albums, they're all confessional. ~ Yoko Ono

We can only talk to those who opt for the sovereign, territorially integral, secular, multiethnic and multi-confessional Syria. ~ Sergei Lavrov

Anytime our sermons become confessional, they become more powerful. ~ Calvin Miller

A book, a true book, is the writer's confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is betrayed, directly or indirectly, by his characters, into presenting publicly his innermost feelings. ~ Nelson Algren

I held it together for the rest of the drive home but as soon as Kelsey dropped me off I flopped face down on the couch and sobbed like a reality TV star on confessional day. ~ Molly Harper

You're not ordinary, Gwyneth," he whispered as he began stroking my hair. "You're totally, absolutely extraordinary. You don't need the magic of any raven to be special to me." He leaned as close as he could get, with his head and arms through the opening of the confessional window, and when his lips touched my mouth, I shut my eyes. Okay. So now I was going to faint. ~ Kerstin Gier

When I went to America, I spoke so much about who I was and gave so much away in a confessional, Irish, story-telling way that I suddenly realised I had given up a lot of myself. I had to shut up. ~ Pierce Brosnan

Bye Bye , Father,' I said as the confessional door clicked shut behind me, 'Ah's' eyes following me, wondering, I suppose, what He'd been drinking the day he went and made a twilight zone of a disaster like me. ~ Patrick McCabe

That pew became a confessional. There, with a fully clothed, fully present Kyle, he left his plans for lifelong commitment to only the Church in a smoldering pile. This woman, this broken, brave, perfect woman was what he needed. They talked again - about funny parishioners and childhood stories. Anything they thought, they said. ~ Debra Anastasia

It is perfectly possible to live a life from cradle to grave that is entirely dishonest.One might never reveal one's true identity, the yearnings and cravings of one's innermost self, even to the most intimate circle of family and friends; never really speak the truth to anyone. Priests and psychotherapists may believe that the confessional-box or the analysis session reveals truths, but you know and I know and every human being knows that we lie all the time to all the world. Lying is as much a part of us as wearing clothes. Indeed Man's first act in Eden was to give names to everything on earth, our first act of possession and falsehood was to take away a stone's right to be a stone by imprisoning it with the name "stone". There are in reality, as Fenellosa said, no nouns in the universe. Man's next great act was to cover himself up. We have been doing so ever since. We feel that our true identities shame us. Lying is a deep part of us. TO take it away is to make us something less than, not more than, human. ~ Stephen Fry

When I do my own books, I take it as more of my own confessional, but when I illustrate for other people, it is intriguing because I feel like I shouldn't be stepping too much into the limelight. It's like playing the piano while someone else is singing. ~ Peter Sis

I've been accused of my publicist of being too confessional ... it's probably my Celtic upbringing. ~ Pierce Brosnan

She was a rare psychotic-confessional-poet strain of salmonella. ~ Augusten Burroughs

So yeah, you were part of the job. Don't get me wrong, Mercer, I like you. You're smart, fluent in sarcasm, and, Bad Dog incident aside, pretty kick-ass at magic. And it's not like you're hard to look at."
"Be still my beating heart."
"But to answer your question, no part of the Archer Cross you knew at Hecate exists. That day in the cellar, I kissed you back because it was my job to stay close to you. If that's where you wanted to take things, then that's where I was going to go. I kissed you because I had to. Not exactly the hardest assignment I've ever had, but an assignment nonetheless."
I stood there absorbing his words like blows, my heart aching. But it wasn't what he said that made me feel like I'd been punched in the chest.
It's that I knew he was lying. That speech came out way too quickly and way too smooth, almost like he'd been practicing it in his head. The same way I'd been practing what I'd say to him if I ever saw him again.
I couldn't even begin to handle that right now, so instead I just said, "Okay,then. Yay for honesty. Now that we're done with the confessional part of the evening, why don't you tell me why we're here."
There was another pause, then he started walking again. I followed, leaves crunching under my feet.
"Like I said, Hacte Hall has always made The Eye nervous."
"Why? Are they allergic to plaid?"
I thought he might laugh, but instead, he said, "Think about it,Mercer.One place where Prodigium rou ~ Rachel Hawkins

Save the contrition for the confessional. Regret isn't worth a damn to anyone. ~ Elizabeth Kelly

Your voice may not be of professional standard, but it is of confessional standard. ~ Keith Getty

Confessional orthodoxy coupled with a view of a heavenly Father whose love is conditioned on his Son's suffering, and further conditioned by our repentance, leads inevitably to a restriction in the preaching of the gospel. Why? Because it leads to a restriction in the heart of the preacher that matches the restriction he sees in the heart of God! ~ Sinclair B. Ferguson

Precision in matters of Christian doctrine is a hallmark of confessional Lutheranism, all for the sake of the Gospel. ~ C.F.W. Walther

I just can't fathom tweeting, and I'd rather spend my time writing a book than a blog, but I rather grudgingly agreed to a Facebook page. I had a brief, intense romance with Facebook. It's weirdly addictive, but anything that time-sucking is a danger for a writer who writes as slowly as I do. Now I post only occasionally and nothing very confessional. I think I'm carbon dating myself as I speak. ~ Debra Dean

The whole point about vision is that it's very individual, it's very personal, and it has to be confessional. It has to be something which hurts - the pulling out of it and putting it on the page hurts. Art can be about the individual writer's response to his or her condition, and if that response comes out of a predigested belief about what the audience wants to hear about the writer's condition, then it has no truth, it has no validity. You either write with your own blood or nobody's. Otherwise it's just ink. ~ Clive Barker

I believe that we're much healthier if we think of our selfishness as sin. Which is what it is: a sin. Even if there is nothing out there except a random movement of untold gases and objects, sin still exists. You don't need a devil with horns. It's a social definition of sin. Everything we do that is self-indulgent, and that is selfish, and that turns us away from our dignity as human beings is a sin against what we were born with, the capacities we have, what we could make of this planet. Our whole age has taken the line that if you feel bad about yourself, it's something that you can be relieved of by your goddamn analyst. Psst! - it's gone! And then you'll be happy, you know? But that feeling is not something you should be relieved of. It's something you should deal with. And there's no remission for what I mean by "sin," except doing something useful. The confessional does the same thing as the shrink, rather more quickly and cheaper. Three "Hail Mary"s, and you're out. But I've never been the kind of religious person that thinks saying "Hail Mary" is gonna get me out of it. ~ Orson Welles

Prayer is not to be used as a confessional, to cancel sin. Such an error would impede true religion. Sin is forgiven only as it is destroyed by Christ - Truth and Light. ~ Mary Baker Eddy