I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

This reflection is generally attributed to Agatha Christie’s autobiographical writing, where she looks back over a long life that included intense personal upheavals as well as professional success. Christie experienced periods of acute distress—most famously during the crisis surrounding her first marriage in the mid-1920s—yet in later retrospection she emphasizes a resilient, life-affirming temperament. The line appears in collections and quotation anthologies as a distilled statement of her outlook: that even when grief and misery are real and overwhelming, they do not cancel a deeper conviction that existence itself is valuable.

The sentence balances two truths: the reality of severe suffering (“wildly…acutely miserable”) and an enduring affirmation (“just to be alive is a grand thing”). Its power comes from refusing sentimentality; the speaker does not deny despair but places it within a larger frame of gratitude and persistence. The quote suggests a philosophy of resilience grounded less in optimism about circumstances than in a fundamental appreciation of life’s facticity—being alive as an intrinsic good. Read alongside Christie’s life story, it can be taken as a mature, hard-won stance: sorrow may rack a person, but it need not define the final meaning of living.