Finding Books by Quotes

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Laura Turner, and today, I'm going to talk with you about how to find a book by its quote. So you know a famous quote, but you're not exactly sure what book it came from, and you'd like to read the entire book. First of all, you can go to your local library and ask your librarian, you know, "Do you know this quote?" Or you can call up, you know, people that you know who might figure it out for you. But if you're really trying to find it and you want to find resources in which to find these things, actually get a book of quotes like the Yale Book of Quotations, which I have right here. And this book is particularly going to be broken up into...by author. But you also have an index at the back that will show you the first words or words contained in quotes. So if you know the quote contains the word "watch", for example, you'll be able to look it up. So once you've got your quote book, you can actually...if you see right here, this is a portion of Ibsen's Enemy of the People. Number 17 here, and you'll be able to actually match that up. It's going to give you the quotation, then it's going to give you the play it came from. So you can actually find it directly using a book like this. However, if you can't find it in a book like this -- this book is obviously not big enough to contain all the quotes and all the books in the world -- you can actually look online at quotation webpages to try to discover part of that quote. Try to nail down exactly what the quote is. Sometimes you're going to remember a quote from a book, and you're not going to remember the entire wording of it. So you can actually search online for the actual wording of your quote. And finally, if you think that you know the book from when the quote came, you can actually try to search electronically through that book with electronic copies of the book, either at your library or online. Those are just some ways to help you locate a book by its quotation."