To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It's easy to say no, even if it means dying.

The line contrasts the moral and practical difficulty of affirming life with the seductive simplicity of refusal. Saying “yes” implies engagement: work, compromise, responsibility, and the messy physicality of living (“both hands…up to the elbows”). Saying “no,” by contrast, can feel pure and effortless—an absolute stance that avoids entanglement, even when it leads to self-destruction. In Anouilh’s dramatic universe, this opposition often maps onto the tension between idealism and lived reality: the desire to remain untainted versus the necessity of acting within imperfect circumstances. The quote suggests courage lies less in grand negations than in the daily labor of consenting to life’s complexity.