I always enjoyed the Quotable Quotes in Reader’s Digest when I was growing up. My uncle used to deposit old copies with me, so they were not the most recent editions, but I devoured them nonetheless. I still have a few remnants of them. The tear off reply slips from the front and back covers still serve as interesting bookmarks, with tempting offers like the new Janet Frazer catalogue, subscriptions to the Complete Works of Dickens, and emigration to Australia.

Over the years I’ve gathered my own favourite quotes, but never really managed to store them in any successful, systematic and easily accessible way. I could add them in this blog, but unless I can comment on them I’m not inclined to do that, since I don’t see a blog as a collection mechanism for quotations.

I recently stumbled on Quoty (not sure how) and have been entering a few quotations into it. It looks promising, so you may want to check it out, and even peek at my small, but growing collection. It’s online, so easily accessible when I’m not at my own computer, but more importantly it allows you to store a reference with the quotation. Not all the online applications seem to allow that, and one of the disappointments I have with John Blanchard’s otherwise excellent quotation collection, The Complete Gathered Gold, is that it only attributes the quotations to their author, without a reference to enable you to find them and read them in context. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs, which I also own, remedies this defect. It’s author index is also a disappointing omission from the Blanchard volume. The Quoty tagging facility beats my cumbersome attempts at an Access database, for frequently a quotation needs to be filed under several subjects. Quotes can be exported in HMTL, PDF and CSV.

I’m planning to give it a go for a few months to see if it suits for longer term.