Since late 2023 I have maintained an incomplete spreadsheet of citations from books, essays, articles that stuck out to me.

Citations for Everyday Life

The idea for this practice is from from an interview with Mindy Seu, where she talks about "developing a citational practice for everyday life":

When I’m reading something, I will speed read, get the big bullet points of each paragraph and understand if it’s helpful for me. If it is, I’ll do a second read that’s more thorough, a close reading to highlight key quotes, annotate, etc. Then if it’s extremely relevant, I’ll transpose those annotations and highlights into Google Docs based on themes: digital gifts, AI, archives. I have a huge repository of quotes and comments that I can pull from when I’m writing an essay using keyword search — you basically note a full citation, like author and title, as well as metadata like who recommended it to you, alongside your quotes and annotations, added into the same doc. I’ll even add quotes from friends, excerpts from films or lectures, anything that seems relevant. Later on, when I’m writing something on that theme, I can draw from this repository and adapt as needed. It’s all about developing a citational practice for everyday life.

Part of that work involves grabbing quotes I have bookmarked from reading on my Kindle.

The workflow for getting those clippings into was as follows:

1. Connect the kindle to my computer via USB
2. Grab the file `My Clippings.txt`
3. Process the clippings to transform them into a CSV, with the help of a little python script: https://gist.github.com/jffng/1a1ee3ddbce2b1362b673b2fa7d1feb0.js
4. Paste into the values into spreadsheet

Profit. Relish in the beauty and wisdom of words you have read and will return to someday in the future.