Jane Austen Quote - Week Nine

This week my quote is from Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park. There are so many amazingly quotable quotes from MP that I'm planning on using one next time, too. :)

Mansfield Park, Penguin Red Classics 2006, volume II, page 216.

"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."

Oh yes! I just love this quote - it gives me a serious case of the "warm fuzzies". Memory can be both a blessing and a curse, but this time I'm going to dwell on the positive side since I'm currently having a Pollyanna-esque love-affair with my own memory ... Oh! Memory is a fickle thing. I love how pointedly Fanny expresses her deeper thoughts about memory (once again, Jane at her finest, understanding humanity/life) - "so retentive ... so obedient" and yet also "weak ... and beyond control" Oh brother, yes! I have just come out the other side of the examination room, and I can vouch for the hair-raisingness of my own somewhat "bewildered" memory, and yet at the very same time, I can nurse my favourite memory, which never dulls, and which makes me glow with happiness every time I recall the scene and face ... oh yes, I love my memory. It is a wonderful gift.

Pic: Frances O'Connor as Fanny Price from: JASA