Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
By the time I was in sixth grade I could bound every country in the world from memory.
My favourite memory was the first time my mum bought me a bubble blower. I must have been the happiest girl in the world that day. I was all over those bubbles like a moth to a flame.
So much of memory comes from the beginning of our lives when we know the world for the first time with a kind of clarity. It is that discovery of the past in the present on which a writer depends again and again as if our lost childhoods, like the surprising cyclamen plant, are forever opening new blossoms.
To attain the rank of grand master of memory, you must be able to perform three seemingly superhuman feats. You have to memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour, the precise order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards in the same amount of time, and one shuffled deck in less than two minutes. There are 36 grand masters of memory in the world.