Like most qualities, cuteness is delineated by what it isn't. Most people aren't cute at all, or if so they quickly outgrow their cuteness ... Elegance, grace, delicacy, beauty, and a lack of self-consciousness: a creature who knows he is cute soon isn't.
Interpretation
Cuteness is defined by its absence in most, and true cuteness fades with self-awareness.
This quote by William S. Burroughs suggests that cuteness is a fleeting quality that is often lost when individuals become self-aware. It implies that traits like elegance and beauty are deeper and more enduring than mere cuteness, which is often superficial and connected to youth or innocence rather than maturity or self-confidence.
In practice
This quote can be used to discuss the nature of beauty in a philosophy class.
God save the Queen and a fascist regime … a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire
There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.
Gentle reader, the Fountain of Youth is radioactive, and those who imbibe its poisonous heavy waters will suffer the hideous fate of decaying metal. Yet almost without exception, the wretched idiot inhabitants of our benighted planet would gulp down this radioactive excrement if it were offered.
Language is a virus from outer space.
One very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and don’t know they know... Once the breakthrough is made, there is a permanent expansion of awareness. But there is always a reaction of rage, of outrage, at the first breakthrough... So the artist, then, expands awareness. And once the breakthrough is made, this becomes part of the general awareness.
when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.
Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.
False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.
Where is that man who has forgotten words that I may have a word with him?
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
When we come to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the world.
If the universe is so bad...how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?
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