Cats didn't start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that cats were originally companions rather than effective hunters, indicating a deeper, spiritual connection with humans.
William S. Burroughs proposes that cats were not bred to be hunters or mousers but rather to serve as psychic companions or familiars. This perspective emphasizes the bond between humans and cats, suggesting that their primary role has always been to provide emotional and spiritual support rather than practical utility in pest control.
In practice
During a speech on pet therapy, referencing this quote can emphasize the emotional support pets provide.
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
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.
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.
You can be as exclusive as you want to in your house, but once you walk outside your house, you have to realize that it's not your world anymore: it's all of our world.
There are lies, damned lies and statistics.
If I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circustance.
Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life.
A person who has not completely lost the memory of paradise, even though it is a faint one, will suffer endlessly. He will feel the call of the essential world, will hear the voice that comes from so far away that one cannot find out where it comes from, a voice that cannot guide him.
Perhaps the enemies of liberty are such only because they judge it by its loud voice.
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