“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.”—English novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817), Mansfield Park (1814)
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