The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life And Freedom On Death Row Quotes
"You don’t have to be locked up to occupy your mind and your days trying to rewrite a painful past or undo a terrible tragedy or make right a horrible wrong."
"I’d like to believe it’s what you choose to do after such an experience that matters the most—that truly changes your life forever."
"Pain and tragedy and injustice happen—they happen to us all."
"God knows my mama didn’t raise no killer."
"There’s no sadder place to be in this world than a place where there’s no hope."
"What does a man do with a love like that?"
"You show your hands, and you own up to what you done."
"Every desperate act has its price, but I didn’t know then that the person who would pay the price was me."
"There was a guilt living in me that had been growing for years, and now it felt like it was festering and rotting out everything good inside me."
"If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have no reason to fear and certainly no reason to run."
"They are arresting me. Taking me to jail. Don’t worry. I didn’t do anything. Don’t worry."
"It’s okay, Mama! It’s going to be okay."
"I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I wasn’t a fool."
"You’re under arrest for first-degree kidnapping, first-degree robbery, first-degree attempted murder."
"Tell the truth," she always said, "and you’ve got nothing to fear."
"God never fails. Hadn’t my mom said as much to me since the time I could walk?"
"He is cloaked in innocence, and you should not consider him anything but innocent until and unless the State of Alabama proves beyond a reasonable doubt to you the facts alleged in these indictments."
"I may not be here, but you remember these words. God is going to show you that I didn’t do it."
"I learned that they gave you an execution date around a month before you were executed. A month to feel terror. A month to beg and plead for your life."
"No one can understand what freedom means until they don’t have it. It’s like being wrapped in a straightjacket all day every day."
"This burden was heavier than the heaviest mountain and he carried it in his heart."
"You can scream out in a crowd of voices also screaming out, and no one hears you—but when you yell into the silence, your voice sounds louder."
"Everything, I realized, is a choice. And spending your days waiting to die is no way to live."
"We were all just trying to find our way."
"Humans were not meant to be locked in a cage, and a man couldn’t survive in a box."
"We weren’t monsters; we were guys trying to survive the best we could."
"The outside world called them monsters. They called all of us monsters. But I didn’t know any monsters on the row."
"It was a revelation to realize that I wasn’t the only man on death row."
"What else could you do? Sometimes you need to make family where you find it, and I knew that to survive I had to make a family of these men and they had to make a family of me."
"In the end, we were all just trying to find our way."
"The very first book club meeting consisted of Jesse Morrison, Victor Kennedy, Larry Heath, Brian Baldwin, Ed Horsley, Henry, and myself."
"We weren’t planning a riot or an escape; we were five black guys and two white guys talking about a James Baldwin book."
"For that month, it seemed like the row was transformed to another place."
"I liked this sentence: ‘For the rebirth of the soul was perpetual; only rebirth every hour could stay the hand of Satan.’"
"You know what I liked? I liked that it’s about hope."
"When we finally did have our meeting, we sat at our respective tables and felt an awkwardness that wasn’t there when we were yelling to each other through the bars of our cell."
"‘I’m going to tell the world about how there was men in here that mattered.’"
"‘I wasn’t a man to them—I’m not even sure they thought of me as human.’"
"‘I would rather die for the truth than live a lie.’"
"‘We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing.’"
"‘Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.’"
"‘I’m going to need my birth certificate for when I get out of here.’"
"‘Maybe I will open up a restaurant. You know I can cook.’"
"People would eat my barbecue no matter where I was grilling it."
"It was September 22, 2002, when the captain of the guards came to my cell."
"You’re going to walk out of here, Ray. We all know it."
"I cried quietly at first. And then it was as if my body were possessed."
"I’m tired, Mama; I want to be with you."
"You have to fight, Ray. You have to never stop fighting."
"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
"I am the poster boy for all that is broken in our prison system."
"We are two poor boys from the old coal mining town of Praco."
"Do we choose love or do we choose hate? Do we help or do we harm?"
"I forgive because not to forgive would only hurt me."
"There’s no way to know the exact second your life changes forever."