Jane, Unlimited

Do you ever feel,” she says to Jane, “like you’re trapped in the wrong version of your life?

People tell you that what happens to you is a direct result of the choices you make, but that's not fair. Half the time, you don't even realize that the choice you're about to make is significant.

Did you ever love someone," Lucy says, "and know they love you, and you're attracted to them, and you know they're attracted to you, and so many things are exactly right, but it doesn't matter, because the few things that are wrong are completely, totally fucked?

There is nothing wrong with impractical loves

Don’t you think it’s the people that make a place feel like home?

The thing about learning that someone isn't who they said they were is that you start to wonder if you ever really had a relationship with them in the first place. You try to picture them, and instead, there's this empty space. The only thing you're sure of is that they were a person who lied.

Rain is a musical patter against Jane's imagination. Every umbrella is born knowing that sound, its soul straining for that sound, waiting patiently through rainless day after rainless day for the day when raindrops will thrum against its skin.

You look — crazed." "It's an artist thing," Jane says. "Don't worry about it.

It's hard for Jane to miss something she can't remember. Or does some part of her miss it? Might it be buried and unseen, but something on which the whole of her life rests, like the foundations of a building?

We all suffer from our origins in one way or another, don't you think?

People other than she might love those umbrellas someday, probably not for Jane's reasons, but for their own reasons — reasons Jane won't know or understand. Jane is beginning to appreciate this wonderful, surreal fact about the creative process.

You really thing I'm an artist?' Jane has responded. But Jane is coming to know the answer to that question on her own. She's seeing her umbrellas differently now. People other than she might love those umbrellas someday, probably not for Jane's reasons, but for their own reasons -- reasons Jane won't know or understand. Jane is beginning to appreciate this wonderful, surreal fact about the creative process.

It's unsettling, to be so far from home- all her usual anxieties lifted, only to be replaced with new ones.

All this time I could've been stopping bullshit with a cocktail umbrella?" "It might only work for really small bullshit.

What Aunt Magnolia is describing is somehow more absurd to Jane than the existence of a fantasy world inside a painting where dogs can talk and rocks have feelings.

Jane takes Ivy’s hand and leads her into another world.

If the people who love you can't recognize you, are you YOU?

Mr.Vanders closes his watering eyes and turns his dark face to the sun. Jane can see every fine line crisscrossing his skin and wonders if the day will come when sudden little details will stop being about Aunt Magnolia, when the lines in the face of an old person won't make her think, Aunt Magnolia will never be that old.

Ah.” He smiles a polite smile, his face creasing into lines that make Jane think he must be at least thirty. Thirty-five? Even older? When do old people get laugh lines?

I'm a spoiled rich girl who has the privilege to mope around, feeling sorry for herself for being unemployed. I get it.