A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.

In Kraus’s paradoxical, epigrammatic style, the line argues that beauty is not a fixed, flawless surface but something that gains force through contrast, contingency, and the full range of human expression. If a woman “cannot be ugly”—i.e., if her appearance is always uniformly pleasing, controlled, or cosmetically insulated from awkwardness, age, fatigue, or strong emotion—then her beauty becomes merely decorative and untested. The capacity to appear “ugly” implies freedom to be unguarded, expressive, and real; it also suggests that beauty is meaningful only against the possibility of its opposite. The remark can be read as a critique of idealized femininity and of aesthetic standards that demand constant prettiness rather than vitality.