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.

More from Agatha Christie

• Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it.
• I continued to do arithmetic with my father, passing proudly through fractions to decimals. I eventually arrived at the point where so many cows ate so much grass, and tanks filled with water in so many hours I found it quite enthralling.
• A baby is God's opinion that life should go on.
• A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.
• A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us. Essays, "Character," 1844
• It won’t be an easy journey. It’ll be long, and arduous. But I promise you one thing: on the memory of those lying here before you, we shall find it, and Earth shall become our new home. So say we all!