Confessions Quotes

There are many more languages than one imagines. And man reveals himself much more often than he wishes. So many things that speak! But there are always so few listeners, so that man, so to speak, only chatters in a void when he engages in confessions. He wastes his truths just as the sun wastes its light. Isn't it too bad that the void has no ears? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face. ~ Augusten Burroughs

He smiles. "You know- I feel everything when you touch me, love. I can feel your excitement. Your nervousness. Your pleasure. And I love it," he says quietly. "I love the way you respond to me. I love the way you want me. I feel it when you lose yourself, the way you trust me when we're together. And I feel your love for me," he whispers. "I feel it in my bones,"
~ Warner to Ella/Juliette ~ Tahareh Mafi

Uncalled for excuses are practical confessions. ~ Charles Simmons

A freshman had to wear a black turtleneck sweater, corduroy trousers, and a little black cap called a 'dink' on the back of his head," he wrote in his autobiography, Confessions of a Maverick ~ Dorothy Wickenden

We are angered even by the full acceptance of our humiliating confessions - how much more by hearing in hard distinct syllables from the lips of a near observer, those confused murmurs which we try to call morbid, and strive against as if they were the oncoming of numbness! ~ George Eliot

My main objective was to interrogate people. I never killed anyone with my own hands. If I hadn't been there, someone else would have taken my place. But it was me: I had a pen, I made notes, I tried to write impartial reports to submit to my superiors, but they wanted confessions that led to more arrests. I sacrificed everything for the Revolution, and back then I believed in what I was doing. I was proud at the time. But as I look back now, it makes me shudder. The fact that I killed more than twelve thousand people makes me feel ashamed. ~ Anonymous

If I were a lesbian and had a thing for narcissistic ex-sorority girls? I'd totally do me.
Bitter is the New Black: Confessions of a Condescending, Egomaniacal, Self-Centered Smart-Ass, or Why You Should Never Carry a Prada Bag to the Unemployment Office: A Memoir ~ Jen Lancaster

Beware of the problem of testing too many hypotheses; the more you torture the data, the more likely they are to confess, but confessions obtained under duress may not be admissible in the court of scientific opinion. ~ Stephen Stigler

It used to amaze me when I'd hear people say that they lived in haunted houses or that they'd been to them. Those types of confessions amazed me because they just sounded so unbelievable. ~ C.A. Rose

Jess Pepper's review of the Avalon Strings:

'In a land so very civilized and modern as ours, it is unpopular to suggest that the mystical isle of Avalon ever truly existed. But I believe I have found proof of it right here in Manhattan.

To understand my reasoning, you must recall first that enchanting tale of a mist-enshrouded isle where medieval women--descended from the gods--spawned heroic men. Most notable among these was the young King Arthur. In their most secret confessions, these mystic heroes acknowledged Avalon, and particularly the music of its maidens, as the source of their power.

Many a school boy has wept reading of Young King Arthur standing silent on the shore as the magical isle disappears from view, shrouded in mist.

The boy longs as Arthur did to leap the bank and pilot his canoe to the distant, singing atoll. To rejoin nymphs who guard in the depths of their water caves the meaning of life. To feel again the power that burns within.

But knowledge fades and memory dims, and schoolboys grow up. As the legend goes, the way became unknown to mortal man. Only woman could navigate the treacherous blanket of white that dipped and swirled at the surface of the water.

And with its fading went also the music of the fabled isle.

Harps and strings that heralded the dawn and incited robed maidens to dance evaporated into the mists of time, and silence ruled.

But I tell you, Kind R ~ Bailey Bristol

I need to fall in love with a hopeless romantic. Someone who would tell me that my eyes are like the stars at night and how my morning bed hair looks like a windswept forest that dances whenever the sky cries every time the ocean quenches her thirst for love. Someone who believes in fate, destiny, and magic. Someone who believes that finding true love is a necessity to cope up with the sadness and agony that life brings. Someone who believes that I exist. ~ Juansen Dizon

Sorrow and profound fatigue are at the heart of Dewey's silence. It had been his ambition to learn "exactly what happened in that house that night." Twice now he'd been told, and the two versions were very much alike, the only serious discrepancy being that Hickock attributed all four deaths to Smith, while Smith contended that Hickock had killed the two women. But the confessions, though they answered
questions of how and why, failed to satisfy his sense of meaningful design. The crime was a psychological accident, virtually an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by lightning. Except for one thing: they had experienced prolonged terror, they had suffered. And Dewey could not forget their sufferings. Nonetheless, he found it possible to look at the man beside him without anger - with, rather, a measure of sympathy - for Perry Smith's life had been no bed of roses but pitiful, an ugly and lonely progress toward one mirage and then another. Dewey's sympathy, however, was not deep enough to accommodate either forgiveness or mercy. He hoped to see Perry and his partner hanged - hanged back to back. ~ Truman Capote

I need the wisdom, reasoning, and apologetics of C. S. Lewis, though some of his theological beliefs are different from mine. I need the preaching and charisma of Charles Spurgeon, though his view of baptism is different from mine. I need the resurrection vision of N. T. Wright and the theology of Jonathan Edwards, though their views on church government are different from mine. I need the passion and prophetic courage of Martin Luther King Jr., the cultural intelligence of Soong-Chan Rah, and the Confessions of St. Augustine, though their ethnicities are different from mine. I need the justice impulse and communal passion of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, though his nationality is different from mine. I need the spiritual thirst and love drive of Brennan Manning and the prophetic wit of G. K. Chesterton, though both are Roman Catholics and I am a Protestant. I need the hymns and personal holiness of John and Charles Wesley, though some of their doctrinal distinctives are different from mine. I need the glorious weakness of Joni Eareckson Tada, the spirituality of Marva Dawn, the trusting perseverance of Elisabeth Elliot, the long-suffering spirit of Amy Carmichael, the transparency of Rebekah Lyons, the thankfulness of Ann Voskamp, the Kingdom vision of Amy Sherman, and the integrity of Patti Sauls, though their gender is different from mine. As St. Augustine reputedly said, "In nonessentials, liberty." To this we might add, "In nonessentials, open-minded receptivity." We Christians m ~ Scott Sauls

Force persuades a person to speak, but it cannot guarantee his honesty. Quite the reverse: it will extract confessions from innocents and lies from simple sinners ... ~ Meredith Duran

Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that "decent drapery" which time or indulgence to human frailty may have drawn over them; accordingly, the greater part of our confessions (that is, spontaneous and extra-judicial confessions) proceed from demireps, adventurers, or swindlers. ~ Thomas De Quincey

He is Thy best servant who looks not so much to hear that from Whee which himself willeth, as rather to will that, which from Thee he heareth. ~ Augustine Of Hippo

And I decide to stop inwardly composing the feminist world court's prosecutorial summation to the jury. ~ Laurie Viera Rigler

Yes, I've killed! I've killed as indiscriminately as God! And yes, I will kill again. I must. ~ N.B. Roberts

I have entered upon a performance which is without example, whose
accomplishment will have no imitator. I mean to present my
fellow-mortals with a man in all the integrity of nature; and this man
shall be myself.

I know my heart, and have studied mankind; I am not made like any one I
have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not
better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature did wisely in
breaking the mould with which she formed me, can only be determined after
having read this work.

Whenever the last trumpet shall sound, I will present myself before the
sovereign judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, thus have
I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and
veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no
crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous
ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory:
I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but
have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood. Such as I was, I
have declared myself; sometimes vile and despicable, at others, virtuous,
generous and sublime; even as thou hast read my inmost soul: Power
eternal! assemble round thy throne an innumerable throng of my
fellow-mortals, let them listen to my confessions, let them blush at my
depravity, ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history's inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike "harder" scientists, we usually cannot resolve issues with a simple experiment, such as adding tube A to tube B and noting the color of the mixture. ~ Jerry A. Coyne

Incredible how quickly a world can change. How my entire person, our friendship, can be reduced to nothing, with just one confession. ~ Alessandra Torre

Writing is the only trade I know of in which sniveling confessions of extreme incompetence are taken as credentials probative of powers to astound the multitude. ~ George V. Higgins

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

All the good writers of confessions, from Augustine onwards, are men who are still a little in love with their sins. ~ Anatole France

It is, in the end, she thinks, the shallowest of confessions: all of the truth, none of the honesty. ~ Colum McCann

...we have chosen to speak of spirituality ultimately as the way in which we live out our response to God. Unless we find this personal, transformational meaning in its fullest sense, the struggle for wholeness will remain unresolved. As Augustine put it in the first paragraph of his Confessions, 'God created us for a relationship with him and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in God. ~ Janet O. Hagberg

We make the choice . . . and then the choice makes us ~ Jaco Strydom

If listening was truly a lifesaving measure, then night shift was a prime time for saving lives. The cover of darkness provided safe cover for the truth to emerge. Confessions, words that people didn't even know resided in them, flew like startled bats into the night. People confessed to stealing things, to hurting people, to loving some and hating others. ~ Karla Theilen

What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist? Not necessity, for necessity comes to many, and they all take refuge in convention. Not moral decision, for nine times out of ten we decide for convention likewise.

What is it, then, that inexorably tips the scales in favour of the extra-ordinary? It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from it's well-worn paths. True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as God, despite its being, as the ordinary man would say, only a personal feeling. But vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape. The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing to one who has a vocation. He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths. Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called….

The original meaning of "to have a vocation" is "to be addressed by a voice." The clearest examples of this are to be found in the avowals of the Old Testament prophets. That it is not just a quaint old-fashioned way of speaking is proved by the confessions of historical personalities such as Goethe and Napolean, to mention only two familiar examples, who made no secret of their feeling of vocation. ~ C.G. Jung

Every conceivable cruel method of blackmail was used against me to obtain by force and at all costs confessions and statements both about comrades who had been arrested, and about political activities. ~ Ernst Thalmann

But they were all full of surprises, he had come to learn. When they were young, they had only their secrets to give one another: confessions were currency, and divulgences were a form of intimacy. Withholding the details of your life from your friends was considered first a sort of mystery and then a kind of stinginess, one that it was understood would preclude true friendship. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Tulse Luper, who without too many confessions, in a sense, is a fictive version of me. I have to say he has far more exciting adventures, and certainly a lot of them sexual, than ever I've experienced. But in a sense, what you do with an alter ego, you give them all sorts of permissions and licences which you know you'll never be able to embrace in your real life. ~ Peter Greenaway

I have no interest in writing confessions, in deliberately baring myself to my readers. I prefer to remain behind a screen. ~ Louis Begley

Fantastic," I said without an ounce of enthusiasm. "I'm just one more embarrassing confession away from taking over the world."
Spencer Nye ~ Jason Letts

Confessions are like tattoos in that 1) You convince yourself that the immediate pain of going through the process means it won't bother you later on; 2) They are permanent. ~ Gina Barreca

I kiss the inside of each knee and up, farther, the roughness of my cheek raising redness on her skin. ~ Michelle Hodkin

In words which can still bring tears to the eyes, St. Augustine describes the desolation into which the death of his friend Nebridius plunged him (Confessions IV, 10). Then he draws a moral. This is what comes, he says, of giving one's heart to anything but God. All human beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away. ~ C.S. Lewis

It was better with the subs than it was with the gold diggers or the hookers. These were real people, with real lives, real jobs, real hearts. It meant something when they submitted to my demands. It meant trust, and trust meant love. I got that
I mean, I understood that. And, oh, Lisa, how I needed that - but I didn't know how to deal. I was too broken. ~ A. Violet End

To read is to dance. A dance of love,
romance,and discovery.Let us all dance!
~Confessions of a Booklover ~ D.Alma

But the one counsel he did give me is something that I will not easily forget: There are many beautiful mystical books written by the Christians. You should read St. Augustine's Confessions, and The Imitation of Christ ~ Thomas Merton

I inquired for Mrs. Reynolds and was shewn up stairs, at the head of which she met me and conducted me into a bed room. I took the bill out of my pocket and gave it to her. Some conversation ensued from which it was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable. ~ Alexander Hamilton

Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but microevolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks at adaptations that concern the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest ... The origin of species - Darwin's problem - remains unsolved. ~ Scott F. Gilbert

To be fair to the Inquisition, they only used confessions extracted after the torture had ended, which let them claim that admissions had been freely given; the fact that the torture would have started again if they hadn't confessed was a minor detail. ~ Simon Hoggart

The big lie of American capitalism is that corporations work in their own best interests. In fact they're constantly doing things that will eventually bring them to their knees. Most of these blunders involve toxic chemicals that any competent chemist should know to be dangerous. They pump these things into the environment and don't even try to protect themselves. The evidence is right there in public, almost as if they'd printed up signed confessions and sprinkled them out of aeroplanes. Sooner or later, someone shows up in a Zodiac and points to that evidence, and the result is devastation far worse than what a terrorist, a Boone, could manage with bombs and guns. All the old men within twenty miles who have come down with tumors become implacable enemies. All the women married to them, all the mothers of damaged children, and even those of undamaged ones. The politicians and the news media trample each other in their haste to pour hellfire down on that corporation. The transformation can happen overnight and it's easy to bring about. You just have to show up and point your finger. ~ Neal Stephenson

While we destroyed the Centre Party, we have not only brought thousands of priests back into the Church, but to millions of respectable people we have restored their faith in their religion and in their priests. The union of the Evangelical Church in a single Church for the whole Reich, the Concordat with the Catholic Church, these are but milestones on the road which leads to the establishment of a useful relation and a useful co operation between the Reich and the two Confessions. ~ Adolf Hitler

I feel no disgust when I hear the confessions of those near their end, whose wounds are full of maggots ... This may give you some idea of my daily work. Picture to yourself a collection of huts with 800 Lepers. No doctor; in fact, as there is no cure, there seems no place for a doctor's skill. ~ Father Damien

Your words seduced me,captured and imprisoned me in a world of wonders.
Enthralled, I lie at your feet,slayed and yearning for more of your magic. ~ D.Alma

If you have never been tortured, or locked up and verbally threatened, you may find it hard to believe that anyone would confess to something he had not done. Intuition holds that the innocent do not make false confessions. ~ David K. Shipler

Sometimes life in my dream-come-true was uncomfortable, like waving good morning and smiling at strangers. That felt foreign to me. And I had never lived in a world where I was the only Latino. In New York City I could hide in plain sight, like a cactus in the desert. In Connecticut, I was a palm tree among spruces."
- excerpt from Confessions of an Internet Pornogrpaher ~ Luis Mario

A castaway adrift on my own little island - rich and with my family along with thousands of beautiful, drunken tourists to keep me company." - excerpt from Confessions of an Internet Pornographer. ~ Luis Mario

Despite the chronic shortages of almost every good and commodity, there was no shortage of paper, since everyone in the neighborhood was required to write confessions on a periodic basis. Even ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

She hitches up onto the bed, her fraying denimed legs dangling from crossed knees. "You know I know you like to watch."
I reach her. Uncross those legs. "I do."
"So watch. ~ Michelle Hodkin

Here's a guy and everybody's there, right? Up to him to put down what's on everybody's mind. He starts the first chorus, then lines up his ideas, people, yeah, yeah, but get it, and then he rises to his fate and has to blow equal to it. All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets it - everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries. Time stops. He's filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing. He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it's not the tune that counts but IT. ~ Jack Kerouac

I am the moon,
and sometimes I shine full in my dark,
and sometimes I shine half in my dark,
and sometimes I am the darkness myself. ~ Juansen Dizon

The explanation has been written already in the three words that were many enough, and plain enough, for my confession. I loved her. ~ Wilkie Collins

I wouldn't be surprised if this were a postcoital smoke, the object of his brief affection tucking himself back into his pants or her shirt in some corridor. ~ Michelle Hodkin

When someone is hiding a secret in a house, something changes in the air. Unspoken words, half finished smiles, eggshell steps - they distort reality, they muffle truth. ~ Michelle Hodkin

Legal systems, at both the national and international level, are therefore required to recognize, guarantee and protect religious freedom, which is a right intrinsically inherent in human nature, in man's dignity as a free being, and is also an indicator of a healthy democracy and cone of the main sources of the legitimacy of the State. Religious freedom ... favors the development of relationships of mutual respect between the different Confessions and their healthy collaboration with the State and political society, without confusion of roles and without antagonism. ~ Pope Francis

I want to buy me a hat with a golden feather & a book with the confessions of God in it ~ Kenneth Patchen

Men have desired, and justly, that women should learn from their confessions in regard to the conflict between man and woman. But woman, because of the conventional conception of womanly purity, has been intimidated from conceding to men a deep insight into her erotic life experiences. ~ Ellen Key

When I shop, the world gets better, and the world is better, but then it's not, and I need to do it again.
(Confessions of a Shopaholic-the movie) ~ Sophie Kinsella

Many religious confessions share common values. They teach that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us. ~ Russell M. Nelson

Emma: Jules, I know you said Diana refused to try to take the Institute, but do you know why...
Jules: No, On the topic of confessions, were you planning on telling the rest of Mark's family why you dumped their brother with no warning?
Emma: You're angry that Mark and I broke up?
Jules: I guess you've dumped two of their brothers, if we're really counting. Who's next? Ty?
Emma: Screw you, Julian Blackthorn. ~ Cassandra Clare

Confess your sins, pray towards the Heavens and be set free from all bondages. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

We deny more than we confess. We hide more than we reveal. We assume because it makes us feel exposed if we have to ask. It's easier to say "I feel nothing" than to admit "I feel something." It takes no courage to say, "I hate you" but it takes a great deal of moxie to declare its opposite. Masks are elaborate and everyone has one. It takes a while to get to know people. This doesn't make them special, it makes them like everyone else. Sometimes our hearts scream yes while our heads say run; and only one can be obeyed. ~ Donna Lynn Hope

The blame of course belonged to Clyde, who just was not much given to talk. Also, he seemed very little curious himself: Grady, alarmed sometimes by the meagerness of his inquiries and the indifference this might suggest, supplied him liberally with personal information; which isn't to say she always told the truth, how many people in love do? or can? but at least she permitted him enough truth to account more or less accurately for all the life she had lived away from him. It was her feeling, however, that he would as soon not hear her confessions: he seemed to want her to be as elusive, as secretive as he was himself. ~ Truman Capote

The Rev "Seized the Day" to conquer the "City of Evil" in "Bat Country", and forced the "Beast and the Harlot" to "Scream" their "Unholy Confessions".
He left them "Trashed and Scattered" and "Blinded In Chains" with the "Strength of the World". He found it "Almost Easy" and became a "Sidewinder" and slithered to "A Little Piece of Heaven" in his "Afterlife", now he is "M.I.A." and his "Nightmare" has come to pass.RIP Jimmy "The Rev" Sullivan, you're gone but NEVER forgotten! ~ Avenged Sevenfold

Because interrogations are intended to coerce confessions, interrogators feel themselves justified in using their coercive means. Consistency regarding the technique is not important; inducing anxiety and fear is the point. ~ Aldrich Ames

The trajectory of my writing has moved further and further away from autobiography. My first stories in Confessions of a Falling Woman worked familiar territory - places I had lived, people I knew, my life as an actor in New York - and many were prompted by or grounded in personal experience. ~ Debra Dean

Nuns are great, but they aren't priests. Nuns can't celebrate Mass. They can't hear confessions or consecrate the Eucharist. They can't become bishops or cardinals or popes, they can't become the people who make the big decisions. How do you change a church that doesn't listen to you? ~ Katie Henry

I try to keep my sitters moving and talking, to make them forget they are being painted. This has nothing to do with extracting intimate secrets or confessions, but rather with establishing, in motion, an essential image of the kind that remains in memory or recurs in dreams. ~ Oskar Kokoschka

I'm Breanna Miller. The smart girl. The quiet girl. The one who belongs to a large family. I'm Breanna Miller. Number 5 in the line of 9. The girl who everybody knows and nobody sees. I'm Breanna Miller. A girl who went to Shamrock's and ended up falling in love with Thomas Turner-Razor of the Reign of Terror. The boy who everyone sees and nobody knows. I've been with him for months. I'm in love with him and I don't care who knows. ~ Katie McGarry

Qu'ils mangent de la brioche. Let them eat cake. On being told that her people had no bread. Attributed to Marie-Antoinette, but remark is much older. Rousseau refers in his Confessions, 1740, to a similar remark, as a well-known saying. Others attribute the remark to the wife of Louis XIV. ~ Marie Antoinette

There is no trans body, no body at all-- no memoir, no confessions, no singular story of "you" or anyone-- outside this broad and awful legacy. So when they ask for our story-- when they want to sell it-- we don't let them forget. ~ Jordy Rosenberg

Every day, thousands of confessions are kept from their would-be confessors, none of these people knowing that their never-admitted secrets all boil down to the same three words: I am afraid. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

It is my intention, moreover, to recount the misfortunes which immediately came upon the whole Jewish nation in consequence of their plots against our Saviour, and to record the ways and the times in which the divine word has been attacked by the Gentiles, and to describe the character of those who at various periods have contended for it in the face of blood and of tortures, as well as the confessions which have been made in our own days, and finally the gracious and kindly succor which our Saviour has afforded them all. Since I propose to write of all these things I shall commence my work with the beginning of the dispensation of our Saviour and Lord Jesus Christ. ~ Eusebius

Some of the tactics that are used by Foxconn and other companies throughout China is, if you are late, if you violate one of the small rules, some of the punishment is that you have to copy down quotations from the chairman of Foxconn: you have to write out confessions explaining why you were late and promising never to do it again. ~ Charles Duhigg

In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I indifferently narrate my fact-less autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it's because I have nothing to say. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Creeds/Confessions: What if we wrote new creeds that put love in the spotlight? Imagine if, instead of reciting a statement of beliefs, we spoke confessions of love, beginning with "We love" rather than "We believe. ~ Brian McLaren

When Straight Women Flirt …With Me

She sits on my lesbian lap
both of us too much wine
arm around my shoulder
hair carelessly tossed from her face
her full weight light upon me
sweet sweat rising in the noisy night
her laugh laps up the smoke
her lean close
her breathing flirts with mine
small confessions of girlhood slumber parties spill out and
into my ear long unspoken memories
of pairing up with other girls to practice kissing
she tosses excitement of kitten innocence
in my face
roller skate caresses
first tastes of delicious shudder

first caress and innocence innocence innocence only in a sense
implication of guilt guilt guilt
the unsaid in her sentence
she tosses excitement
her breathing breathless breathing breath breast
breasts breasts breasts oh flirt with my
around my shoulder lean close close close
both of us taste too much
too much to touch ankles thighs fingers ribs eyes ears toes
her arm my shoulder my shoulder her arm alarm disarm
dare me dare me dare me
no harm my shoulder her arm my shoulder hold her fold her
I never told her
my small confession:
I don't practice
kissing ~ Nancy Boutilier

Willa maintains a vigil. Certain tasks are relegated to women. Mourning, staring into the wastes, waiting for no one to surface.

It's a white man who's missing. Usually, that would be enough to keep it in the news, but eight days in, the police release their grief in an official report. The art of blame-casting is a lesser sorcery. History is written in sand, and a broom changes everything. Every woman knows the art of covering up a mess: a carpet, a dustpan, bleach on the boards. What do you do with the cleaning supplies of the world? Use them to wash the blood away, and grind the bones into bread. Swallow the confessions whispered in bed.

If events don't make sense, a story grows to cover up the confusion. Motives and mistakes. ~ Maria Dahvana Headley

A secret is a strange thing. There are three kinds of secrets. One is the sort everyone knows about, the sort you need at least two people for. One to keep it. One to never know. The second is a harder kind of secret: one you keep from yourself. Every day, thousands of confessions are kept from their would-be confessors, none of these people knowing that their never-admitted secrets all boil down to the same three words: I am afraid. And then there is the third kind of secret, the most hidden kind. A secret no one knows about. Perhaps it was known once, but was taken to the grave. Or maybe it is a useless mystery, arcane and lonely, unfound because no one ever looked for it. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

I really don't feel that any of the pieces I wrote were confessions; there are no revelations about secrets in my life, and actually I have nothing to confess and I certainly do not ask for redemption and there is no reward for confessing that I expect. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

Sometimes you feel alone because, like you, others aren't so ready to confess their shortcomings and struggles. ~ Darnell Lamont Walker

Pg 623 When they were young, they had only their secrets to give one another:
Confessions were currency, and divulgences were a form of intimacy. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

My hearing has suffered seriously; just now I am obliged to have the assistance of an ear trumpet. Think of that, my beauty! - There 's a state for your old Lover to be in! - No more tender whisperings! Imagine sweet confessions to be made through an ear trumpet! ~ Samuel Lover

Telling Sam and Daneca feels like peeling off my own skin to expose everything underneath. It hurts. ~ Holly Black

On August 1, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel granted the CIA's request to begin water-boarding Abu Zubaydah. The technique, tantamount to torture, was designed to elicit confessions through the threat of imminent death by drowning. That same day John Yoo, now a deputy to Attorney General Ashcroft, advised the White House that the laws against torture did not apply to American interrogators. The president, the vice president, the secretary of defense, and the director of Central Intelligence approved. The ~ Tim Weiner

Augustine's Confessions ... "What it is, therefore," he begins, "that goes on within the soul, since it takes greater delight if things that it loves are found or restored to it than if it had always possessed them? ~ Philip Yancey

Confessions are not processed or analysed; they're told in a moment of desperation to a priest or to somebody interrogating you about a crime. ~ Meghan Daum

I have heard thousands of confessions, but never one of covetousness. ~ Francis Xavier

He wanted to write urgent love letters to her all day long and crowd the endless pages with desperate, uninhibited confessions of his humble worship and need with careful instructions for administering artificial respiration. He wanted to pour out to her in torrents of self-pity all his unbearable loneliness and despair and warn her never to leave the boric acid or the aspirin in reach of the children or to cross a street against the traffic light. He did not wish to worry her. ~ Joseph Heller

Artists, especially writers, great writers, are the most honest people I know. There are deep confessions in their words. And if we're strong enough to expose the spaces between them, we find truths there also. ~ Darnell Lamont Walker

My confession begins," Father S said, "as the confessions of many men begin - with three words"
"Father forgive me?" Michael hazarded a guess. Father S signed.
"I met Eleanor. ~ Tiffany Reisz

I had loved Kitty -I would always love Kitty. But I had lived with her a kind of queer half-life, hiding from my own true self. Since then I had refused to love at all, had become - or so I thought - a creature beyond passion, driving others to their secret, humiliating confessions of lust; but never offering my own. ~ Sarah Waters

Convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i.e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand. This is so not because such confessions are unlikely to be true but because the methods used to extract them offend an underlying principle in the enforcement of our criminal law: that ours is an accusatorial and not an inquisitorial system a system in which the State must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured and may not by coercion prove its charges against an accused out of his own mouth. ~ Felix Frankfurter

I like the rough impersonality of New York ... Human relations are oiled by jokes, complaints, and confessions-all made with the assumption of never seeing the other person again. ~ Bill Bradley

When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing. ~ Hannah Arendt

I knew that his confession would be a tremendous relief to him but a burden to me. Such information, once shared, can never be retracted. ~ Karen Essex