From Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, chapter 22:
"If any one faculty of our nature may be called more
wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems
something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the
failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our
intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable,
so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others
again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle
every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem
peculiarly past finding out."
--Fanny |
