I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.
Interpretation
The quote compares Jeanne's uniqueness and talent to an unused piano in a land where no one can play it.
Angela Carter's quote highlights the idea of inherent beauty and potential that goes unrecognized or unappreciated in an environment that limits expression and creativity. The metaphor of a piano in a country without hands suggests that Jeanne's qualities are extraordinary, yet they cannot be fully realized or valued due to the circumstances around her, emphasizing the disconnect between potential and opportunity.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of artistic expression in restrictive societies.
She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg: she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver.
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.
For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written β heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.
Iconic clothing has been secularized. . . . A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.
To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.
When I was working upon the ABC books, I wanted to show different ways that mainstream comics could viably have gone, that they didn't have to follow 'Watchmen' and the other 1980s books down this relentlessly dark route. It was never my intention to start a trend for darkness. I'm not a particularly dark individual.
It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.
I am sure the next step will be the electronic image, and I hope I shall live to see it. I trust that the creative eye will continue to function, whatever technological innovations may develop.
Music is a weapon of the future / music is the weapon of the progressives / music is the weapon of the givers of life
Jazz music is a language of the emotions.
Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our own spontaneous expression with good humored inflexibility whether the whole cry of voices is on the other side.
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