Quotes About Confessional

#1. 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.

Fredrik Sjoberg

#2. Talking about my personal life onstage, I've realized I'm not one of those comics who can do that. I can allude to it but I don't want to be a confessional performer ...

David Rees

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. A fitting room to me has always been like a confessional ... where my body and my contrition take up the entire room.

Erma Bombeck

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

Andy Greenwald

#7. 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

#8. People assume when they come into a church and see a person up there speaking, 'That person must be a good person.' My challenge through the years has been believing that: 'I guess I must be a really good person.' I struggle with it. It just helps me to keep that confessional posture.

Max Lucado

#9. A priest cannot acknowledge the sin or the sinner outside of the confessional.

Julie Garwood

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

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

Stephen Malkmus

#15. Overheard in a Washington D.C. church confessional: "Bless me Father, for sins have been committed."

Robert Breault

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. I'd always liked our inside jokes the best - they made me feel more connected to Amy than any amount of confessional truth-telling or passionate lovemaking or talk-till-sunrising.

Gillian Flynn

#20. Through the confessional system, the Catholic church spied upon the lives of its congregants. While Latin mass excluded most people who could not speak Latin from an understanding of the very system of thought that bound them.

Julian Assange

#21. I hate the confessional. I love leaving the confessional. I hate going to the confessional. I would be a mess without it.

Lino Rulli

#22. 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

#23. I've been writing a lot about a new form of Russian imperialism. Actually, Russian Orthodox imperialism. It's very little remarked that the cement, the political, ideological cement of the Russian regime now, communism having collapsed and imploded, is increasingly a confessional one.

Christopher Hitchens

#24. Apostasy occurs when a church leaves its historic moorings, abandons its historic confessional position, and degenerates into a state where either essential Christian truths are blatantly denied or the denial of such truths is widely tolerated.

R.C. Sproul

#25. 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

#26. I get told I'm a confessional songwriter, which gets on my tits because I think of negative connotations attached to the word "confessional". I don't like the idea of songwriting being therapy. I don't want to put myself so directly in the foreground.

Beth Orton

#27. The work that's interesting to me in other people is really confessional.

Lena Dunham

#28. The new Babylonian captivity is what we have done to ourselves, namely, the strange fascination with our contemporary culture evident across denominational and confessional lines.

Harold L. Senkbeil

#29. The domain of Calvinism is indeed far broader than the narrow confessional interpretation would lead us to suppose.

Abraham Kuyper

#30. 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

#31. Augustine, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are confessional writers and all three make me sick. I have nothing in common with them.

Joni Mitchell

#32. Many of us are confessional giants but ethical midgets.

Mark Buchanan

#33. 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

#34. She was a rare psychotic-confessional-poet strain of salmonella.

Augusten Burroughs

#35. Some of my favorite poems are "confessional" poems written in the voices of aliens ("Southbound on the Freeway" by May Swenson" and "Report from the Surface" by Anthony McCann), sheep ("Snow Line" by John Berryman) or a yak ("The Only Yak in Batesville, Virginia" by Oni Buchanan).

Matthea Harvey

#36. Anytime our sermons become confessional, they become more powerful.

Calvin Miller

#37. 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

#38. If you go back to all my albums, they're all confessional.

Yoko Ono

#39. 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

#40. I'm interested in how the confessional is so abrasively critiqued today. I'm not really comfortable with simply confessing but I do think "confessing" is a major part of reckoning.

Kiese Laymon

#41. The hazard of confessional books is how fast the world moves on while they're written.

Tina Brown

#42. 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

#43. A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.

John Irving

#44. Precision in matters of Christian doctrine is a hallmark of confessional Lutheranism, all for the sake of the Gospel.

C.F.W. Walther

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

Pope Francis

#46. Syria is a multi-confessional state: in addition to Sunni and Shia Muslims, there are Alawites, Orthodox and other Christian confessions, Druzes, and Kurds.

Sergei Lavrov

#47. Bill is a fiction writer, but he writes in the first-person voice in a style that is tell-all confessional; in fact, his fiction sounds as much like a memoir as he can make it sound.

John Irving

#48. 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

#49. 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.

#50. 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

#51. As a reader I don't distinguish between confessional and non-confessional work. After all, how do we even know that certain "I" poems are confessional? It's a tricky business, this correlating of the speaker and the poet.

Matthea Harvey

#52. Save the contrition for the confessional. Regret isn't worth a damn to anyone.

Elizabeth Kelly

#53. A confessional passage has probably never been written that didn't stink a little bit of the writer's pride in having given up his pride.

J.D. Salinger

#54. 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

#55. I read 'The Conspiracy Against the Human Race' and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writer's ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster.

Nic Pizzolatto

#56. The way I work, I'm not a confessional singer-songwriter.

Andrew Bird

#57. Look at it this way - a totem pole is just a decorated tree. My work is a confessional.

Louise Bourgeois

#58. 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

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

Sergei Lavrov

#60. My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me.

Michael Pollan

#61. It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.

Thomas Pynchon

#62. 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

#63. My usual confessional is a straight Macallan but not before 5 o'clock. Perhaps that's why I try and have my crises in the evening.

Jeanette Winterson

#64. I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find.

Anne Lamott

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. I do think that there is a hunger in the land for a vision of confessional Christianity that is robust, God-centered, tough-minded, able to address today and tomorrow and the next day, and comprehensive.

D. A. Carson

#68. My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it's so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

Taylor Swift

#69. 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

#70. I'm not a very confessional artist, you know. I don't ever reveal what I'm feeling in my work, or what I think about the President. I use nature. I use found images.

Vija Celmins

#71. 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

#72. The new evangelization ... begins in the confessional.

Pope Benedict XVI

#73. I've been accused of my publicist of being too confessional ... it's probably my Celtic upbringing.

Pierce Brosnan

#74. The first person is a tradition I relate to and that I use; historically, it's been the voice I work in. But the hair on the back of my neck stands up when I'm referred to as a 'confessional' writer.

Meghan Daum

#75. "Confessional poetry" is another one of those labels. It goes in and out of fashion.

Matthea Harvey

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. Discourse about the world merges with confessional discourse about oneself.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#80. I've always thought that it might be fun to be Catholic, to be able to go to the confessional and unburden yourself and have someone tell you that they forgive you, to take all the sin away, wipe the slate clean.

Paula Hawkins

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

Matthea Harvey

#82. We missed a lot of church, so the music is our confessional.

Big Boi

#83. After so much reality TV and confessional celebrity interviews, the public is tired of accessible stars. Who needs them to be 'Just Like Us?' 'Just Like Us' means just as boring as we are.

Tina Brown

#84. 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

#85. Everyone assumed it had to be some sort of biography, because if you are a woman and use yourself as a character, it has to be some sort of confessional, whereas if you're a man, you're actually doing some post-modern play on the novel, some critique on identity with lots of references to Foucault.

Jeanette Winterson

#86. 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

#87. And I am flawed but I am cleaning up so well.

Dashboard Confessional

#88. I long for the day I no longer long for him.

Franki Fiori

#89. When I come to be united to thee with all my being, then there will be no more pain and toil for me, and my life shall be a real life, being wholly filled by thee.

Augustine Of Hippo

#90. Come together. Twins Forever.

Tegan Quin