My Characters Shall Have, After

Sometimes One Is Guided By What They Say Of Themselves, And Very Frequently By What Other People Say Of Them, Without Giving Oneself Time To Deliberate And Judge." -elinor Dashwood

Upon The Whole, Therefore, She Found, What Has Been Sometimes Found Before, That An Event To Which She Had Looked Forward With Impatient Desire, Did Not In Taking Place, Bring All The Satisfaction She Had Promised Herself. It Was Consequently Necessary To Name Some Other Period For The Commencement Of Actual Felicity; To Have Some Other Point On Which Her Wishes And Hopes Might Be Fixed, And By Again Enjoying The Pleasure Of Anticipation, Console Herself For The Present, And Prepare For Another Disappointment.

Fortunately For Those Who Pay Their Court Through Such Foibles, A Fond Mother, Though, In Pursuit Of Praise For Her Children, The Most Rapacious Of Human Beings, Is Likewise The Most Credulous; Her Demands Are Exorbitant; But She Will Swallow Any Thing.

I Cannot Fix On The Hour, Or The Spot, Or The Look Or The Words, Which Laid The Foundation. It Is Too Long Ago. I Was In The Middle Before I Knew That I Had Begun.

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.