One quote per file, or put them all in the one file?

I’ve been using Tana.inc for a little while now. Being an outliner, I have a page for each book/paper I’m reading and a bullet for every quote I want to record. Against each quote I have a number of “topics” (like a keyword or index). The topics link all sorts of info across my knowledge base.

I want to do something similar with Obsidian. It seems that I will need to put each quote in a separate .md file so I can assign its individual topics (as tags or properties). Is there a better way? Ideally I’d like to have it all in the one file for the book/paper, but somehow linked to a topic where each quote is somewhat unique.

My goal here is to be able to search by topic and find all the related quotes, atomic notes, etc. that relate to it.

Tags in Obsidian officially apply to the whole note, but because Search shows a preview of every match, you can tag individual paragraphs or list items and it will work. (If the text you’re tagging is long, you may need to use “Show more context” in the search options.)

6 Likes