All of our punishment institutions, including jails, laws, church confessionals, and so forth, are systems of illusion. The order of the universe, the infinite justice of yin and yang, naturally takes care of all motion and compensation. We don't need to invent arbitrary ways to make balance with punishments.
— Michio Kushi
Successful Confessional quotations
I've always written songs that were confessional, acoustic, wordy - my writing style matches my personality. The music always has to match the mouth it comes out of.
Don't confuse simple, reasonable honesty with radical silliness.
There is no reason to try to articulate blurry feelings or over-explain every detail. The point is to be honest instead of internalizing, not to try to extract juicy confessionals out of everyday life.
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.
Emo: e-mo 1. A much-maligned, mocked, and misunderstood term for melodic, expressive, and confessional punk rock.
It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.
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.
Look at it this way - a totem pole is just a decorated tree. My work is a confessional.
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.
No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression.
Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?
The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord's mercy motivates us to do better.
A fitting room to me has always been like a confessional .
.. where my body and my contrition take up the entire room.
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.
Many of us are confessional giants but ethical midgets.
Overheard in a Washington D.C. church confessional: "Bless me Father, for sins have been committed."
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.
I was never trying to be funny. Being funny feels to me like an alternate form of confessionality - that is, a way of dismantling the distance between writer and reader, a way of saying, "come in a little closer."
Augustine, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are confessional writers and all three make me sick. I have nothing in common with them.
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.
My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me.
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.
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.
My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it's so drawn from my own life and my own stories.
If you go back to all my albums, they're all confessional.
I think that the moment we're living in offers the best opportunity we've had in a long time in that a lot of things having to do with identity politics are being talked about in poems. The only problem there is that a lot of the time these are being talked about in confessional modes.
I think that the casual reader and the lyric and confession are trickily tied up together. I mean often when I read my students' poems my first impulse is to say, "O, the subject of this pronoun, this 'I,' is whatever kid wrote this poem." The audience for lyric poems is "confessionalized" to some extent. And I think this audience tends to find long narrative poems, for instance, kind of bewildering.
People get anxious about dividing sorts of poetry, say Confessionalism from political poetry. But Confessionalism is very much an expression of racial privilege and of class privilege. I don't think it's always a blind expression of these privileges but it does have its genesis in them, in the politics of them.
Confessionalism relates to writers of color.
I think confessional poetry is in its way very Catholic, capital C. One of the formative ideas of Confessionalism, beyond psychoanalysis, is a very actual fall from grace. And, at least in America, people of color never occupy that position of grace the way that white people do. So I think that in some very actual ways the confessional mode, strictly speaking, is not possible for non-white writers.
There's nothing confessional about crafting and shaping a story out of a lived life. In fact, it's quite the opposite - the writer has to be able to transcend the life, to see it as if standing outside of it, in order to be able to make something of it. There's something enormously satisfying and gratifying about crafting something, taking all that chaos and giving it shape.
In the end, you do need institutions to transmit the faith for the long haul.
That's why I make the case that, in certain ways, American Protestants could stand to recover the denominationalism that they've left behind over the last 50 years. They are real values in having a confessional tradition that can sustain your faith over the long term.
The book [Saving Calvinism] itself is not recommending that we move the borders, so to speak. It is recommending that we look at what lies within the confessional bounds of Reformed thought.
Reformed theology belongs to this confessional tradition, and Reformed theologians and churches continue to write confessions even today.
The confessional singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s was in full swing, and Bob Dylan's emotional album [ Blood on the Tracks] resonated with the times. There would be other hits, but never the same alchemy of emotion and time.
People "confess" can be wildly different.
I might go into the confessional and say, "Father, what is my obsession with miniatures?"
"Confessional poetry" is another one of those labels. It goes in and out of fashion.