What book is this quote from? Five ways to trace a line

To find out what book a quote is from, search the exact words in quotation marks, then search inside books with Google Books, then check famous lines with a quote checker, because many of them are misattributed. If that fails, ask other readers, and check your own notes.

I have a line tattooed on me that I can't trace. It's from an episode of a writing podcast, and I have never found the episode again. So I'm not writing this as an expert. I'm writing it as someone with a permanent reminder of why it matters.

#1. Search the exact words

Type the line into a search engine, inside quotation marks, so it looks for those words in that order. If you're not sure of the wording, use the part you're surest of, or the strangest few words.

Then look at where it comes up. A page that names the book and the page number is a good sign. A page full of the same quote on a pretty background is not: quote websites copy from each other, mistakes included.

#2. Search inside the books themselves

Google Books searches the text of millions of books. Put the line in quotation marks there, and you'll often get the book, the edition and the page, which a quote website can't give you.

For older books, the Internet Archive's full-text search does the same. For classics, Project Gutenberg has the complete texts. More on searching inside books in how to find a quote in a book.

#3. Check it, if it's famous

Famous quotes travel, and as they travel they collect famous names. A line by someone obscure is much more likely to be shared under the name of someone everyone knows.

The historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote this in an academic article in 1976:

Well-behaved women seldom make history.

— Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, 1976

It has since been printed on T-shirts and mugs under the names of far more famous women. If a quote sounds too perfect for the person it's attributed to, check it. Quote Investigator researches exactly this, and Wikiquote separates sourced quotes from disputed ones.

#4. Ask other readers

Some lines can't be searched because you only remember the feeling. That's when people help. Librarians are astonishingly good at this, and many libraries answer questions online. Reading communities, book clubs and forums for identifying half-remembered books are full of people who enjoy the hunt.

Give them everything you've got: roughly when you read it, whether it was a novel or non-fiction, what happened around the line, even the colour of the cover.

#5. Check your own notes first

This should be first, really, but nobody believes it until it happens to them.

I once spent an hour searching a book for a line about hospitals. My own library had it, with the source, the whole time; it was from a different book. And while writing these notes I found that I'd filed my favourite Vonnegut line under the wrong novel. My memory had kept the thought and given it to the wrong author. My notes had kept both.

If you keep a commonplace book, search it before you search the world. And if you don't yet, the next line you love is a good place to start.