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Nicholas Sim

Nicholas’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (156)
currently-reading‎ (0)
read‎ (299)
reference‎ (5)
puzzles‎ (2)
tragedies‎ (31)
historical-fiction‎ (19)

applied-non-fiction‎ (15)
science-fiction‎ (15)
to-read-again‎ (13)
about-literature‎ (12)
philosophy-non-mathematics‎ (12)
historical-non-fiction‎ (11)
mathematics-philosophy‎ (10)

other-non-fiction‎ (9)
psychology-cs‎ (9)
short-stories‎ (7)
absurdist‎ (6)
dramas‎ (5)
dystopian‎ (5)
essays‎ (4)

language‎ (3)
mathematics-non-philosophy‎ (3)
postcolonial‎ (3)
existentialist‎ (2)
mystery‎ (1)

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“Stop agreeing with everything I say! It's not as if you're going to solve everything by admitting your mistakes. Whether or not you admit then or not, mistakes are mistakes."
"It's true," I said. It -was- true.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

tags: mistakes

4 likes

“Under the sun the couple presented smiles to the world. Under the moon, they were lost in thought: and so they had quietly passed the years.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Gate

24 likes

“In short, whoever does violence to truth or its expression eventually mutilates justice, even though he thinks he is serving it. From this point of view, we shall deny to the very end that a press is true because it is revolutionary; it will be revolutionary only if it is true, and never otherwise.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

tags: censorship, injustice, justice, press, revolution, truth

15 likes

“What can I expect here? You know the fairy tale about the man who died, don’t you? He was waiting in Eternity to find out what the Lord had decided to do with him. He waited and waited, for one year, ten years, a hundred years. He begged and pleaded for a decision. Finally he couldn’t bear the waiting any longer. Then they said to him: ‘What do you think you’re waiting for? You’ve been in Hell for a long time already.”
― Anna Seghers, Transit

tags: humour, life

19 likes

“But I can see what has ensued. A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.” He paused for a long moment; then he smiled slightly. “The scholar should not be asked to destroy what he has aimed his life to build.”
― John Williams, Stoner

12 likes

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