Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert E. Howard

The line hits with the clipped pride of someone who knows the score and refuses consolation. “I have accomplished little enough” is a preemptive strike against praise and pity alike: Howard grants the world its likely verdict (minor success, limited recognition) before anyone can hand it to him as an insult. Then he pivots to the real point: whatever the ledger shows, it’s unbought. “Such as it is” sounds modest, but it’s also a dare - an insistence that the only achievement worth claiming is the kind you can’t outsource, inherit, or be awarded by proximity.

Howard wrote from the margins of American literary prestige, churning out pulp fiction in a marketplace that paid fast and forgetful, with cultural gatekeepers treating the whole enterprise as disposable. In that context, “the result of my own efforts” isn’t just a self-help mantra; it’s a defense of authorship under conditions designed to cheapen it. He’s asserting labor and agency against a system that measures worth by status and polish, not output.

The subtext is anxiety braided with defiance. Howard is both anticipating judgment and trying to immunize himself from it by relocating value: not in how “much” he’s accomplished, but in the fact that it’s his. For a writer whose heroes often carve meaning from harsh worlds with muscle and will, the sentence is almost autobiographical mythmaking - a small, stubborn claim of sovereignty.