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.
Outlaws, like lovers, poets, and tubercular composers who cough blood onto piano keys, do their finest work in the slippery rays of the moon.
For me, that emotional payoff is what itβs all about. I want you to laugh or cry when you read a story...or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If you want to learn something, go to school.
There was always a part of me that wanted to be an old-time director. But I couldn't do that. I'm not a pro.
We hated Bauhaus. It was a bad time in architecture. They just didnβt have any talent. All they had were rules. Even for knives and forks they created rules. Picasso would never have accepted rules. The house is like a machine? No! The mechanical is ugly. The rule is the worst thing. You just want to break it.
How many writers are there... who, breaking up their subject into details, destroy its life, and defraud us of the whole by their anxiety about the parts.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
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