I was locked out of the house for three hours with nothing but an English textbook and some bottled water- back in the old days before high school kids carried cell phones!
I know the RENT Libberetto by heart, all of it every word.
I also know most of Romeo and Juliet.
I’ve memorized all the numbers between 1 and one billion. In order.
But it’s hard to prove, 'cause it takes too long to recite.
Well … in high school, I memorized the first 200 digits of pi. I can still recite them. I’m so ashamed.
I also memorized all 15 minutes and 47 seconds of Meco’s Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk, more popularly known as “The Disco version of Star Wars.” (The version they played on the radio was cut down to 3 minutes or so, but the LP came in at 15:47.)
Most of the script for Fellowship of the Rings and the Two Towers. When my friends say anything that resemblances any line from the movies I would go on with the rest of the lines from the script.
It drives them crazy. (“Let go south.” “South - I always like to go South…”)
Yah, but when you lot say you’ve memorized ‘Holy Grail’, does that mean you could do the whole thing word-perfect WITHOUT visual cues? I too can mumble along with the good bits, but can’t call it memorized.
I can however recite the entire Rocky Horror Picture Show in my head while trying to get to sleep. Yes, word-perfect, with optional audience participation, although my singing is off-key. 
My claim to fame however would be 450+ Cocktail recipies, (measures,prep,garnish etc) plus variations and substitutues.
However that sort of approaches stuff you memorize for a reason (aka work) and I don’t think they are as bizzare.
I could for example recite the entire set of HTML tags and which browser and version they were introduced in, but that’s just mad. I hate myself for knowing it so deeply :smack:
Other fun ones were ‘Jabberwocky’, A few old stand-up-routines, yeah - lots of Shakespeare and Music Lyrics. I wish I could still do “the Raven” that is a GOOD party trick.
Arlo Guthrie’s song (but not the movie of the same title) “Alice’s Restaurant” which runs 'bout 19 minutes.
Also a novelty tune from 1974 performed by a band called “Reunion,” “Life is a Rock (But the Radio Rollled Me).” The hardest part was for me, a kid, to figure out all the words without a lyrics sheet. Worse than “Louie, Louie.”
17 Shakespearean speeches
Part I and some more of Longfellow’s Evangeline. This totaled some 600 lines.
I memorized Coleridge:
In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn
A stately pleasure dome decree
etc.
That’s about the longest that fits in my long-term memory. 
Goethe´s Faust. Both parts. Together with my best friend in school, when we were 15 or so. We could recite the entire friggin play. Two years before we actually read it in school.
Yup, I was a weird kid.
I can recite the Episcopalian services of Evening and Morning Prayer, but that’s not too special- I’ve heard them every Sunday for my whole life.
Actually trying to memorise? To His Coy Mistress, Andrew Marvell, Ulysses, Lord Tennyson, The Donkey, G. K. Chesterton, The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter, Ezra Pound, Burnt Norton, East Coker and half of The Dry Salvages, plus A Song For Simeon- all T.S.Eliot. I’m going to do The Journey of the Magi and The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock eventually. Fern Hill, And Death Shall Have No Dominion, The Conversation of Prayers About to be Said and bits of A Child’s Christmas In Wales, Dylan Thomas. In Flanders Fields, John McCrae.
Probably more, but I can’t remember them right now. I have a pretty good memory for strings of words- can’t remember single, disconnected ones so I suck at learning languages.
Oh! Some Emily Dickinson, and The Song of the Master and the Boatswain, W. H. Auden. Forgot those.
It’s good to know that I’m not the only one.
Other memorized material (roughly in order of memorization):
The Raven (FTR, a small child reciting this from memory disturbs people ;))
The Walrus and the Carpenter
The Trouble with Tribbles complete with inflections, accents, and <ahem> “dramatic” pauses.
Richard III
The Tempest
Merchant of Venice
Scattered throughout that list are the many songs I have stuck in my head. The prize for most annoying goes to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”; I heard it once, and the whole thing stuck. I heard that song in my head nonstop for a week.
I haven’t memorized anything substantial other than songs since high school. Most of the stuff from back then has faded with time, but I could still fill several notebooks with song lyrics.
I’ve gotta ask… Is there some quick and dirty trick to this you can share? I find memorizing music quite tedious, and in my case it simply amounts to having practiced it so often that it’s memorized. Sadly, I cannot seem to easily commit a page of sheet music to memory.
Now for the OP:
There’s a small group of folks on this board who operated nuclear power plants in the Navy at one time – any thread on nuclear power will shake a few of us out of the woodwork.
Now, about that training program… The school wasn’t so bad; though it was somewhat harder than any college classes I took in my more recent days. The really nasty part was hands-on training at prototype power plants.
The method of learning was to study a particular system thoroughly, memorize its diagrams from the plant technical manuals, memorize the physical layout of its components, and then endure a half-hour grilling on the subject by a staff instructor who would undoubtedly require you to draw the whole system on a whiteboard and regurgitate volumes of technical stats.
If you satisfied him, you got a signature in your telephone-book-sized signature book (one down, 659 to go!).
Anyone who made it through this program had committed dozens, if not hundreds, of technical diagrams to memory along with all of their associated details. (think: being able to draw all of the schematics from an automobile tech manual, with annotations).
We sometimes relied on bawdy memory tricks to memorize some of the details:
(One of the cleaner ones: the twelve primary plant chemical analyses: “Did Debbie Hide In Chuck’s Green Car Prior To Coming Very Violently” :))
Since it was the Navy, the teachers actually taught the mnemonics in full color.
These details were not allowed to fade: For final qualification, one had to satisfy a four-hour oral board with an engineer, officer, and a senior enlistedman – you and them in a small room with a flag and a whiteboard.
That part of my life is ancient history and has absolutely no bearing on what I do now, but I can still reproduce much of that work.
I wouldn’t know, but I strongly suspect that medical school students endure far more memorization, having to draw vast portions of anatomy and so forth.
Lots of movies, poems, Shakespeare monologues (Hamlets soliloquy fits perfectly in the guitar solo portion of “My Friend of Misery” by Metallica), songs, commercials, chapters of books, etc. Oddly though, I dont recall what day it is most of the time, or if Ive eaten recently. Also cant remember if Ive taken my gingko yet.
I remember the entire intro to Star Fox 64 (plus copious levels):
“Corneria, fourth planet of the Lylat system, the evil Andross turned this once…”
(soooo sad).
Pah! Due to my constant exposure to sacred music when I was a chorister, I can now recite the entire Gloria from the Ordinary of the Mass, in Ecclesiastical Latin – in 30 seconds flat!
My sister and I can both recite Fellowship of the Ring along with the movie, and I’ve learned A Elbereth Gilthoniel and most of Namarie by heart as well. I know the vast majority of the poems in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by heart. I have a number of songs in Armenian, French, Latin, Welsh, Portuguese, and of course English down pat. At one time I could recite all of the movie The Wizard of Oz, although now I need to be watching in order to get the next line. I’d say I also know RENT by heart, even now, when I haven’t listened to it in ages.
I find that I have a lot more in my memory that I never really think about. I was looking at my little sister’s history textbook, a later edition of one I used when I was her age, and was surprised to find that I could very easily notice where paragraphs had been added or changed, or page layouts altered. It kind of disturbed me that I knew this textbook so well–mine are lucky if I crack them the morning of a test nowadays.
My goal? The Hunting of the Snark–all eight fits. I believe Nabokov accomplished this, and I’m easily as cool as he was.
“I came here to chew gum and memorize words, and I’m all out of gum!”