Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books - but it is terrible when one has to live it.

The line contrasts life as an object of contemplation—something safely framed by conversation, literature, or historical narrative—with life as it is actually endured. Anouilh’s phrasing suggests that distance and form (the “history book” version) make experience seem coherent, meaningful, even “wonderful,” while lived reality is messy, painful, and resistant to tidy interpretation. The quote also hints at the aesthetic temptation to turn suffering into story: once events are past and shaped into narrative, they can be admired; in the moment, they are “terrible.” It fits Anouilh’s recurring dramatic tension between idealized purity and compromised, ordinary existence.