You marked those passages because they mattered. Refrain brings a few of them back each day — seamlessly imported, beautifully set, and read entirely on your own devices.
Free forever. No subscription. · Native on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch
The daily return
Not a backlog. Not a reading assignment. Just a few passages waiting for you when you have a minute. One you dog-eared opens the deck; a rediscovery from a book you haven't visited in months closes it.
Some are old favorites. Some you haven't seen in years. Some you may have forgotten entirely.
No streaks. No scores. Nothing to keep up with. Closer to morning coffee than a workout app.
It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.MiddlemarchGeorge Eliot
It's been 8 months since you opened Middlemarch.
Your library
Your books, wearing their real covers — and behind each one, every passage you marked, beautifully set and one tap away.
Sort by recent, title, or author. Star your favorites. Hide the ones you'd rather forget.
The shelf is free. It's your library.
Your passages aren't random. They're a record of what caught your attention — across books, years, authors, and ideas. Refrain reads your library on your device and finds the passages that rhyme, the ideas that keep returning, and the connections you never noticed.
This is where Refrain gets interesting.
Threads
You may have been thinking about something longer than you realized. Refrain finds passages across your library that belong to the same line of thought — even when you read them years apart and the authors used completely different words. Those passages gather into threads you can return to on their own.
You read the books. Refrain finds the thread.
Threads are part of the $4.99 one-time unlock — and you'll see how many threads run through your books before you pay a cent.
Rhymes
A passage about attention. A passage about how you spend your days. Different books, different authors, different words — they rhyme.
Refrain finds passages that resonate by meaning, not by matching words.
Search finds your words. Rhymes find your meaning.
My experience is what I agree to attend to.The Principles of PsychologyWilliam James
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.The Writing LifeAnnie Dillard
Search by meaning
Free search finds the words. The unlock finds the meaning: search for paying attention and Refrain can find passages about attention that never use those words.
Exact matches still come first. Then Refrain shows you what rhymes with your search.
The words are only the beginning.
Everyone knows what attention is.The Principles of PsychologyWilliam James
Rhymes with your search
The soul is dyed by the thoughts.MeditationsMarcus Aurelius
Echoes
The deck closes with an echo: a line from the wider canon that resonates with what you've been reading. A philosopher. A novelist. A poet. A judge. Someone you may never have encountered.
Refrain doesn't force a match. If there's no good echo, there is no echo. Because a quiet day is better than a false connection.
Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.
Henry David Thoreau · Walden, 1854
echoes your thread “The cost of complexity”
Insights
Sometimes a passage starts a thought of your own. Add an insight and keep it with the passage or thread that sparked it.
Your words stay distinct from the book's words — and from what Refrain found.
Not just what you read. What you thought about it.
Every author I keep returning to is really talking about attention.
You · kept with the thread “What attention asks of us”
Go deeper
When a passage deserves an afternoon, go deeper gathers the context around it: the passage itself, your note, its rhymes, the thread it belongs to, and a few sharp questions worth pursuing. Then Refrain writes the brief.
Refrain writes the brief. You decide who reads it.
Coming in 2.0: readings in Refrain. Tap Go deeper and a reading appears beside the passage — written while you watch, by Apple's model on Apple's Private Cloud Compute, answering the questions you choose. It stays with the passage, and its question can come back in your daily deck. Nothing sent until you tap. The hand-off stays.
Hand to your AI →
Import
Sign in to Amazon inside Refrain and your Kindle highlights come across with their books, notes, and real covers. Every book gets a cover, even the ones that never had one.
Older Kindle, or sideloaded books? Bring over your My Clippings.txt file. No duplicate passages. No fiddling.
Your library is ready when you are.
One passage a day on your Home Screen. Your library on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. Your passages and insights stay in sync through your own iCloud.
No account to create.
Coming in 2.0
Refrain 2.0 is coming in October, and it is built for iPhone Duo's launch. Open the phone and Refrain lays out as a spread: your passage on the left page, what it connects to on the facing page — the passages that rhyme with it, the thread it runs through, today's echo, Go deeper. The fold is the gutter. No line of text will cross it.
And on every device, Go deeper will read the passage for you. Tap it and a reading appears beside the passage, written by Apple's model on Apple's Private Cloud Compute, answering the questions you choose — why you marked it, the fuller picture, the best objection, one question to sit with. The reading stays with the passage, and a question you sit with comes back in your daily deck. Nothing is sent until you tap, and the reading comes back to you — not to us. Hand to your AI stays.
The phone opens like a book. So will Refrain.
The spread comes with the app. What fills the facing page follows the unlock — and until then, you'll see the true count. On an iPad in landscape and on the Mac, the facing page sits beside the passage too.
The cost of an interruption is not the ninety seconds it takes to answer the message. It is the twenty-three minutes of fractured attention that follow.ReductionRavi Quinn · Jul 2021
Rhymes with
Knowledge workers now switch tasks every few minutes, and each switch leaves a residue of attention on the task they just left.
Kerned · Marcus Lindqvist
Runs through
Attention Residue
Go deeper →
Privacy
Refrain doesn't need your data to work. There is no Refrain account. No Refrain server. Your library lives on your devices and syncs through your own iCloud. Every intelligent feature that reads your passages runs on your device.
Nothing of yours ever reaches us. Learn how →
Refrain is complete for free. The $4.99 unlock isn't something you need to access your library — it simply adds the layer that helps you discover what's hiding inside it.
Your library, beautifully returned. Free, forever.
Discover what's hiding in your library. $4.99, once.
You already did the hard part. You found the passages worth keeping. Refrain gives them a way to come back — and a way to show you what you couldn't see the first time.
Free for your whole library. $4.99 once to unlock the discovery layer.