I have been keeping a quote spreadsheet for a number of years now. It came in handy when I started my daily quote project the summer after first year. It still comes in handy now.
I’ve always felt a desire to hang onto things, to document them. Whether it was through photography or sound recording I wanted to capture things.
In high school I started a quote notebook with one of my friends. We wanted to remember all the funny things people were saying, all the inside jokes. Spoken words are fleeting, we wanted to put them down on paper.
While listening to an episode of Other Ppl with Brad Listi (I don’t remember who the guest was currently) I learned about commonplace books, notebooks that people took notes in but mostly recorded quotes from books they’d read. It was basically what I was doing.
One of the things we have talked a lot about in my thesis class is taking notes and keeping track of everything. I learned the value of making citations as you go a long time ago through painful midnight desperation as an undergrad but I am still wrangling with the project of how to keep track of things. I am trying to find effective workflows and habits that keep things organized and let me get stuff done.
It’s an endless struggle, staying on top of all of it, trying to impose order on the chaos of my scattered existence. My project for the month is to tackle my piles of books. Some of them are books that I’ve read but need to go through. For thesis, for a project of some kind. Something I need to learn a good system for doing.
One of the piles amongst the piles is one of commonplace books. The introductions all tell a similar story and I am delighted I came across these things.
It seems that this impulse to store quotes somewhere is a very common one across time. I have the bonus of being able to do it in a digital, searchable form that is easy to carry around — I originally started in a notebook but it had an altercation with a spilled cup of coffee and didn’t survive.
Here are some of the quotes:
Communicating this information in quote form seems a fitting approach.
I enjoy how much attention is devoted to paper, to the physical things on which the Commonplace Books were recorded.