The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls

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"I do not ask for health," he said, "but I will go anywhere and live in
any place where I can enjoy the existence of a human being." He seldom
complained and it is rare to find even the brave sort of cry he made
against fate to a friend at this time.

"For fourteen years I have not had a day's real health. I have wakened
sick and gone to bed weary, and I have done my work unflinchingly. I
have written in bed, and written out of it, written in hemorrhages,
written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam
for weakness, and for so long, it seems to me I have won my wager and
recovered my glove. I am better now, have been, rightly speaking, since
I first came to the Pacific; and still few are the days when I am not in
some physical distress. And the battle goes on--ill or well, is a
trifle; so as it goes. I was made for a contest, and the Powers have so
willed that my battlefield shall be this dingy inglorious one of the
bed and the physics bottle."