"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations

"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti


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Monday, April 25, 2011

Robert Louis Stevenson - Requiem


Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850-1894


Robert with his mother at a young age

Robert as a young author at the age of 26




Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse ye grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be,
  Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.



Robert Louis Stevenson (c.1850-1894), was a Scottish novelist, poet, and essayist, best known for his adventure stories like Treasure Island. Stevenson was a sickly man (he died of tuberculosis) who nevertheless led an adventurous life. He spent his last five years on the island of Samoa as a planter and chief of the natives.

At the time of penning his own epitaph, Requiem (1879) Stevenson was ill, distraught and close to death. Recovering, he lived another 15 years before passing away in his beloved Samoa. And it is this same poem that can now be found engraved upon his tombstone.















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