I’ve previously written about the general practice of keeping a common place book. In this piece I’ll do a deeper dive on my approach to organizing quotes within my commonplace book.
What Steps are Involved?
- Collect quotes and other identifying information
- Thread the quotes across various pages of your book, if needed
- Categorize the quotes
- Create an index
As an optional step, you could insert the quotes into your personal knowledge management (PKM) system and link them to other quotes, notes, or idea. Details on a PKM system are outside of the scope of this piece and won’t be detailed here.
Collect Quotes
Quotes can come from anywhere. In my own records I have quotes from books, podcasts, lectures, songs, magazine articles, advertisements, and overheard conversations. It’s important that you collect the source of the quote as you capture it, just in case you need it.
Most of my quotes are collected in some kind of notebook, either a portable one that I carry most places or a larger one that I keep at home. I’ll sometimes capture them in a notes app on my phone, especially if I see or hear something while driving–in which case I’ll use the voice actuated feature in my CarPlay app. (Keep your eyes on the road and hands on the wheel!)
An example page of notes is shown here.
Thread The Quotes
Threading is a technique that I first saw in the Bullet Journal method and it’s nothing more than a quick notation to help you follow an idea across discontinuous pages in your notebook. In the top example photo you can see an arrow pointing on the lower right to 24–that means that my quotes pages are continued on page 24 of my notebook, which is 2 pages after the current page.
In the below example photo I have an arrow in the upper left, pointing backwards to page 15. In that case, I had skipped a couple of pages before this block of quotes.
Categorize the Quotes
Here’s the fun part. When your book is complete, or you just want to see what kinds of information you have collected, you can build an index. The process that I use is as follows:
- I figure out some common categories for the quotes that I’ve harvested
- I then prepare a 2 page spread where I list these categories
- Under each category, I list the author and the page number where the quote can be found
- In case the quote applies to several categories, I’ll list the author and page number under each applicable category
What’s Next?
After you’ve been doing this for a while, you might be wondering how you can find a quote that you remember capturing in your notebook collection. especially if it looks like this.
For some low tech ideas, you could do the following:
- Give each notebook a volume number, and create a master index of categories, authors, and the volume number it appears in.
- Photocopy each of your notes index pages and put them together somewhere
- Take all of the quotes pages out of your notebooks and paper clip or staple them together.
- Write all of your quotes on pages that can be stored in a ring binder
For higher tech systems, there are Personal Knowledge Management systems that are digital (using apps Apple Notes, Notion, or Obsidian) or index card based systems (like a zettlekaster or an idea box). If you are interested in these systems, a quick search on google or YouTube will provide you with many hours of information and entertainment to help you build your own.