Quote of the Day (Jane Austen, on Memory)

“How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind! 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 controul! 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)

The image accompanying this post shows Frances O’Connor as Fanny Price, the character who says the above words, in the 1999 film adaptation of Mansfield Park.