Life Itself Is The Most Wonderful

This line appears in Andersen's autobiography The Story of My Life (Mit Livs Eventyr, 1855), where it functions as the book's governing metaphor: his own improbable journey from a cobbler's son in Odense to international celebrity is itself the fairy tale he could not have invented. The Danish word eventyr means both "adventure" and "fairy tale," giving the phrase a double resonance that translation can only approximate.