And You Can Quote Me: Mansfield Park; Jane Austen

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.

'It is as a dream, a pleasant dream!' he exclaimed, breaking forth again, after a few minutes' musing. 'I shall always look back on our theatricals with exquisite pleasure. There was such an interest, such an animation, such a spirit diffused. Everybody felt it. We were alive. There was employment, hope, solicitude, bustle for every hour of the day. Always some little objection, some little doubt, some little anxiety to be got over. I never was happier.'

But tell me about it. Talk to me forever.

The impossibility of not doing everything in the world to make Fanny Price happy, or of ceasing to love Fanny Price, was of course the groundwork of his eloquent answer.

If I had the power of recalling any one week of my existence, it should be that week, that acting week.

Nay, in sober sadness, I believe I now love you all.

When I think of this being the last time of seeing you for I do not know how long, I feel it quite impossible to do anything but love you.

But were I to attempt to tell you of all the women whom I have known to be in love with him, I should never have done.