In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.

Burroughs’s line draws a hard boundary between genuine grief and the consoling fictions people often reach for when pain becomes overwhelming. “Sentimentality” here suggests a softening or aestheticizing of sorrow—turning it into a story with comforting meanings, moral lessons, or performative emotion. “Deep sadness,” by contrast, is presented as stark and unsparing: it resists decoration, rhetoric, and self-soothing. The remark fits Burroughs’s broader suspicion of received narratives and emotional clichés, implying that profound suffering demands clarity and honesty rather than melodrama. It also hints at an ethic of endurance: when grief is real, one must face it directly, without the protective haze of sentimental language.