If any one faculty of our nature may be called...

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.

Jane Austen, English novelist whose works of romantic fiction (1775-1817), ‘Mansfield Park’, cited in Roger Highfield, 75th stories: Mapping memories - Eleanor Maguire and brain imaging, Wellcome Trust, 5 July 2011 (via amiquote)

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