Richard John Taylor

"To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea." ? Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head This man fired up my ongoing love for the English language. And he could do that in a very authentic way, setting an example I will never forget. He enriched my life and still does.

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another. Ernest Hemingway

Shall I compare thee to a summers day Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed. But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st; Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st, So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. Sonnet 18 William Shakespeare