Good call. I always use my browser's search function (in firefox its command-F), but we'll try to add that as well!

I've been using that, but this would be easier. :)

Thanks!

Do you think you could make a quotes widget that doesn't use javascript? I'd really like to be able to put it on my myspace. Thanks!!

Sorry, but I'm not seeing how to edit quotes and fix the author where the quote has more than 10 fans. When I tried to change the inaccurate Dahl quote (which has something like 84 fans), I got a message saying the change had been saved but nothing actually changed on the quote itself. Or did you mean that you're going to implement that capability for librarians? Thanks.

Laura, I've noticed than when people are editing quotes, that the results don't show right away. Think it's a caching issue.

I'm always short on cache myself.

How do you edit the quotes? There are no options next to any of my quotes that allow me to edit them.
Also, I'm not sure if you already have this, but it would be really cool if we could export our favorite quotes in order to save it on a computer. Currently I'm typing in my favorite quotes and copying it to a word file and it would be really cool to just type it in one place and be finished :-)

Click on "x people liked this quote" and you will be taken to a page with an "edit" option.

oh cool thanks! :-)

I love the new (to me -- I'm new too!) quote feature and look forward to storing my favorite quotes here on goodreads. But now I have noticed that quotes can be deleted by librarians. What happens in that case? Not that I would enter a revolting quote or anything, but I would like to be sure that my collection of quotes would remain intact or that I would at least be provided with a copy before it disappeared.

Lenore wrote: "I love the new (to me -- I'm new too!) quote feature and look forward to storing my favorite quotes here on goodreads. But now I have noticed that quotes can be deleted by librarians. What happen..."

Quotes are deleted by librarians mainly if they are not book related...things like Homer Simpson quotes, quotes by your grandma, stuff like that. Sometimes quotes are also deleted if they are nonsensical (typos, etc) and no correct version can be found, or if the quote is misattributed. Basically, librarians are just trying to keep the quotes section book related and correctly listed.

Isis_FG wrote: "Quotes are deleted by librarians mainly if they are not book related..."

Hmmm.... I do have some that are not strictly speaking book-related and a few that are unattributed. So it sounds like if I care about the integrity of my quote collection, I had better export often, since I don't "own" my quotes here on goodreads.

Thanks for the clarification. It's just what I need to make my decision.

I had no idea quotes were supposed to be book related. Besides being a silly rule, it would seem most of the quotes here would not fit in that category. Is there something that tells people the quotes should be book related?

I don't really understand, is GR trying to build a "great quotes" depository? There are lots of those on the web. I thought the quotes were just to expand on your personality profile. Why shouldn't someone have quotes from their grandma?

Billy,

Here's the add a quote page:

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/new

The instructions are clear about what kinds of quotes can be added.

I don't think it's silly at all to have the quotes book related. I don't see quotes as a way to expand our personality profiles. We can do that on our profile pages. Quotes go into the Goodreads database and there's close to 2 million members, and quotes should be of interest to many of those members. And this is a books-reading site, not just a social site. Hence the book related guidelines.

Edit: Needless to say, most members wouldn't care what a single member's grandma said, no matter how perceptive or funny.

The guidelines don't say anything about being book related. Actually it says the only criteria is that they be from "notable people".

I just went and looked at the top quotes page. Most were not from books, many not from authors, most not about books. I'm not sure how the Marilyn Monroe quote that appears on the first page is OK (although I don't believe for a second that she said that), but Homer Simpson is not. Miss Piggy is one of the names on the first page.

My question is; What is the point of the quotes, if not to express the personality of the GR member on their page? Since this is a "book-reading" site, not a quote database site, why shouldn't members be able to quote anyone they want? Maybe their friend Dave has something great to say. How does that hurt anyone?

Why would people not care what a member's grandma said if it were perceptive or witty? I like perceptive and witty quotes, I don't particularly think everything a famous person says is interesting. I've skipped around the list and some of them consist of whole pages from "Twilight" or something like that.

I'm not against cleaning up quotes and combining, trying to give the correct credit, etc. I'm all for it. But if librarians are deleting things they don't like it would be better if everyone knew the criteria.

Well, grandmas are not notable people. But maybe Otis can chime in. I don't think any librarian has an agenda. It's up to Goodreads what quotes are allowed and which are not legitimate.

"Notable People" is also linked to a definition on Wikipedia. Someone's grandmother wouldn't fit the criteria.

Also, many users don't even include quotes that would be considered perceptive or witty. They include inside jokes. Or they put utter nonsense in the quote box. I just deleted a quote that was literally the alphabet written out in lower case letters. What value is there in that?

Personally, I think it's a shame we can't flag users who abuse the quote tool. Because users who do so once, usually do so repeatedly.

Yes, I understand the meaning of "notable people". I'm asking why.

As said, many of the quotes are not perceptive or witty or whatever. But if they are from notable people they are OK, while interesting quotes from non-notable people are not. I also don't see how a paragraph from Twilight qualifies as a quote from a notable person.

I'm not trying to start an argument about this, just curious about the criteria. It doesn't really seem to be very clear cut to me.

I believe the original idea was just for literary quotes. That got expanded to include quotes from notable people, because of the desire to include quotes from well known people who never wrote a book.

My best guess is this is the clearest line in the sand they could draw without completely restricting things to book quotes, or completely opening up the quote server to anything and everything.

There are proverbs and old sayings that are valuable, but some people seem to want to include every cliched email forward they've ever gotten. Or quote odd things like commercials.

Yes, there are anonymous quotes that are far superior to the endless "Twilight" quotes, but judging those quotes for validity would be extremely subjective.

I think the guidelines on the add a quote page are fairly clear. They were written that way, as someone already said, because we wanted literary quotes and then noticed people really like quotes. We want to collect a large and useful database of inspiring and interesting and even humorous quotes.

The reason for only allowing quotes from notable people is to make sure the quotes are interesting. Your grandmother may be very wise, but we can't be sure people will like her quotes unless she is notable. I think its the only way to do it without opening the floodgates for a lot of useless content.

I would like to see a keyword option to narrow down quotes you are looking to combine much like there is when combining books. I was trying to combine quotes by an author with 400 quotes, and found it impossible to find the duplicates I was looking to combine.

Ctrl-F helps a lot. But yes, a filter would be great.

I like this feature very much, but I wish Goodreads didn't add quotation marks around the quote. Some quotes are multi-paragraph passages and include spoken dialogue within the passage. Putting quotations around the whole passage makes the quote grammatically incorrect.

Maybe add a "Quote is a passage?" checkbox when adding a new quote or editing an existing quote?