How to find a quote in a book

To find a quote in a book, search for the most unusual words you remember, in quotation marks, inside a searchable version of the book: the e-book, Google Books, Amazon's Look Inside or the Internet Archive. They'll show you the page as well.

I once spent an hour leafing through a book, line by line, for a sentence I was sure was in it. It wasn't. (That story is here.) So this note is partly an apology to my past self.

#Start with the strangest words

You won't remember the quote exactly. Nobody does. But you'll remember one or two words in it that are unusual: a name, an image, an odd combination.

Search for those, not the common ones. "Yeast" and "champagne" will find a Vonnegut line faster than "life" and "purpose".

#Use quotation marks, then take them away

Put a phrase in quotation marks to search for those exact words in that order. If nothing comes up, your memory has probably changed a word or two: take the quotation marks away, or search for two short phrases instead of one long one.

#Where to search

• The e-book. If you own it as an e-book, the search finds every occurrence in seconds.

• Google Books. Search across millions of books, or inside one book with "search inside". Many show a snippet with the page number.

• Amazon's Look Inside. For many newer books, you can search the full text and see the page.

• The Internet Archive. Full-text search across a huge library of scanned books, especially older ones.

• Project Gutenberg. For classics out of copyright, the complete text, free, searchable in your browser.

• The index. For non-fiction, the old way still works: look up the subject in the index at the back.

#Finding the page number

Page numbers change between editions, paperbacks and hardbacks, translations. If you need the page for an essay, use the edition you're citing and note the edition next to the page. Google Books and the Internet Archive both show which edition a page comes from.

#When you only remember the meaning

Sometimes you don't have a single word, only the shape of it: "something about hospitals being like an immune system". Exact-phrase search can't help with that.

Try three or four key words without quotation marks. Or, if the line is in your own notes, search by meaning: Filament's Jog my memory finds a line from a description in your own words. That's how I found my hospital line, in a book I'd never have looked in.

#The best search is never needing one

Every method here is a rescue. The real fix is boring: keep the page with the line the day you read it. If you collect your quotes as you go, with their sources, the search is already done. Here's how I do it.

If you don't know which book a line came from at all, that's a different hunt: what book is this quote from?