In his poem, “Searching”, Billy Collins describes how people remember books. It begins:

I recall someone once admitting      
that all he remembered of Anna Karenina  
was something about a picnic basket

The then gives a personal example of a book about Barcelona. “All I remember”, he writes, “is the mention of an albino gorilla” named Snowflake, who once lived in a Barcelona zoo. To conclude the poem, he addresses Snowflake,

You were the reason  
I kept my light on late into the night     
turning all those pages, searching for you everywhere.

I have often experienced what Collins describes. I remember how pressing it once felt to track down the source of a quote about loving a woman for singing. I eventually found it in King Lear, when Kent is talking about his age:

Not so young, sir, 
to love a woman for singing, 
nor so old to dote on her for anything.

There was a time where I scoured the internet for a quote I swore T.S. Eliot made about work. Something like, “The world is full of people doing soul crushing work. No one I love will do such work if I have anything to do with it.” I wasn’t able to locate that one.

Neither was I able to find a quote by Rilke that I remembered to so effectively describe consciousness in trees. I took a moment to ask ChatGPT, “What did Rilke say about the consciousness of trees?” Its answer was not satisfactory, so I asked “What about the consciousness of plants?” I kept asking questions, and the answers were circular. It is possible that I made up the Rilke quote, or refashioned it in my memory to fit an independent idea I had at the time. The same may be true about the T.S. Eliot quote.

I’m not sure why it feels so pressing to locate an idea in a text. I’ve been trying to figure out what Collins meant when he wrote:

Here [Snowflake] has been mentioned again in print   
in this poem where she has found another cage.

I think it has something to do with giving too much importance to the things you find in books.

References.
Collins, Billy. Ballistics. New York: Random House, 2008.