You finish a book. You've highlighted forty passages - the ones that actually mattered, the sentences you stopped on and read twice. Then, a week later, you open your highlights export and it's a wall of text with no context, sitting in a file you'll never open again.
The instinct to fix this is to turn each highlight into a flashcard. (If you want the bigger picture first, how to actually remember what you read covers why highlights alone fail.) But if that means retyping forty passages by hand - copying the sentence, writing a question for it, guessing at what "the answer" even is out of context - most people do the first five and stop. Not because the idea is wrong. Because the retyping is where the habit dies.
The retyping problem
Every extra step between "I want to remember this" and "this is in my review queue" is a place to quit. Retyping a highlight isn't just slow - it strips the passage out of the page it came from. You lose the surrounding paragraph, the chapter it sat in, the reason it caught your eye in the first place. What's left is a flashcard that tests whether you memorized an isolated sentence, not whether you understood the idea.
That's the real cost of the copy-paste-into-a-separate-app workflow: even when you push through and make the cards, they're worse cards.
Point the card at the source instead
In Cirello, a card doesn't have to be typed text on both sides. It can prompt straight from a real source - a book, a website, an image - plus a short instruction, like "page 118" or "the paragraph about compound interest." You're not retyping the passage. You're telling the card where to find it.
When that card comes up for review, you're back in the actual page, in the actual context, not staring at a sentence someone (you) extracted and flattened six months ago.
A highlight stripped of its page is just a sentence. Reviewed from the source, it's still the idea.
Why context changes what you retain
Memory doesn't work in isolated fragments as well as people assume. A fact tied to where you encountered it - the page layout, the argument building up to it, the chapter title above it - is easier to reconstruct than the same fact floating alone. Reviewing from the source keeps that scaffolding intact every time the card comes back around, instead of asking you to recall a sentence stripped of everywhere it used to live.
It also removes the awkward step of writing your own quiz question for each highlight. You don't need to invent "what did the author say about X" - the instruction can just point at the passage, and the source does the rest.
What this looks like in practice
Add a book as a resource once. Then, as you read, capture the passages worth remembering with a page reference instead of a full retype. Add a link to an article the same way - point at the section instead of copying the paragraph out of it. Images work the same: capture a diagram or a page photo and let a card point straight at it.
None of this requires deciding, card by card, whether a passage is "flashcard-worthy enough" to justify retyping it. The bar for capturing something drops to: is this worth coming back to. Everything else - the actual question-writing your brain would otherwise have to do - stays where it already lives, in the source.
For crisp facts you do want to pull out of a book, small front and back cards still work best, and how to write good flashcards shows how to keep them small. If you already have a list of terms or quotes, paste it in bulk. The reason any of this works is the forgetting curve, covered in the forgetting curve. There is also a short overview on the remember book highlights page.