I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on an another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves.

— Christopher Hitchens

I hold my finger up to his lips. He flicks his eyes down to look at it." You're absolved," I tell him. He brings his eyes back up to mine. There's no fucking way he knows what that word means. That's a word I dream someone will say to me. So I put it in his language. "You're free.

— Hannah Moskowitz

It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.

— Oscar Wilde

More than any of us, she had written her own story; yet she could not wash it out with all her tears, return to her victims what she had torn from them, and by so doing, save herself...

— Sandra Worth

Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Only through Absolution will you reach the Absolute.

— Toni Petrinovich

Pause your opinions, debating and absolute knowing for long enough to conceive gratitude.

— Bryant McGill

Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional -- to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. Furthermore, he removes us from the presence of death.

— Kate Summerscale

Redemption was asking too much, but he could hope. Something told him he’d still be seeking absolution when he took his last breath on some distant day.

— Kelly Moran

Someone's forgiveness will not heal you; condemnation or absolution is their test, not yours.

— Bryant McGill