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Screenshot of Alfred app showing the results of searching my Readwise highlights for the term “behaviourism” using the command “!r behaviourism”.

Storing and Retrieving Quotes in Readwise

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▶ Table of Contents

  1. Storing Quotes
  2. Retrieving Quotes

Storing Quotes

As I read through the web, I save web pages and PDFs and other documents to Raindrop.io and DEVONthink.

For web pages, I highlight the pages directly in browser using Raindrop.io. My Raindrop.io highlights sync with Readwise which syncs with other tools I use.

Raindrop doesn’t yet support highlighting PDFs. DevonThink highlights PDFs but doesn’t sync with Readwise. So, I often use the Readwise Reader to highlight PDFs.

Highlights I make in my eBook readers also sync to Readwise.

This collects my highlights from all kinds of sources into Readwise as my canonical highlight/quote store.

Retrieving Quotes

This tooling allows me to do things like search my highlights directly from my keyboard launcher, Alfred.

Screenshot of Alfred app showing the results of searching my Readwise highlights for the term “behaviourism” using the command “!r behaviourism”.
Screenshot of Alfred app showing the results of searching my Readwise highlights for the term “behaviourism” using the command “!r behaviourism”.
Screenshot of a quote displayed in glowing green text against a black background. Quote reads: But one reason the shift to Fordism is particularly important is that alongside restricting neuronormativity, it also brought new Fordist methods of care and control. Following the critique from anti-psychiatry, while costly psychoanalytic approaches, and the more barbaric treatments such as lobotomy, became less popular, new more economically efficient and lucrative therapeutic approaches were increasingly adopted and developed. In an important sense these would allow psychiatry and psychology to extend their reach far beyond the walls of the asylums, and into a much greater part of public and private life. Among the most important of these was behaviourism. This would be developed by psychologists, giving them increased clinical and societal influence that would in time come to match that of the psychiatrists of the asylums. Robert Chapman: Empire of Normality
Screenshot of a quote displayed in glowing green text against a black background.

Readwise exports to Obsidian, a Markdown based note-taking application. Obsidian stores the quote in Markdown format. Since my workflow is heavily Markdown based, this is very convenient.

I use both DEVONthink and Ulysses, my favorite writing app, to index the Obsidian store so that my quotes are pulled into my research archives and into my writing context.

▶ Table of Contents

  1. Storing Quotes
  2. Retrieving Quotes