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1 " I notice I am taking risks with my own security and losing my sensitivity to danger. I don't know it at the time, but the effects of war are reaching into me in unexpected ways, and I am being changed by them. I am surrounded by destruction and the randomness of death, which I cannot fathom. I have felt the closeness of death as tangibly as the whisper of a murderous seducer, and felt the richness, twinged by guilt, of having escaped its grasp. I have seen too often the numb lost look of men consumed by undiluted grief, and heard the howl of children as their mothers are pulled from the rubble of a rocket-blasted home, and I am coming to understand the long dark pain of those who silently endure what first seems unendurable. "
― Jason Elliot , The Network
2 " If you were to roam the world from the arctic goldfields of Kotzebue Sound to the pearl-fisheries of Thursday Island,’ wrote Lowell Thomas when he visited the region in the 1920s, ‘you could find no men more worthy of the title “desperado” than the Pushtuns who live among these jagged, saw-tooth mountains of the Afghan frontier.’Elliot, Jason. Unexpected Light (p. 56). Pan Macmillan UK. Kindle Edition. "
― Jason Elliot , An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan
3 " There was in a village a blind man, very happily married, but to an ugly woman. One day a healer arrived, and offered to cure the man’s blindness. A council of the village elders was convened to decide on the matter, and a vote was taken in favour of allowing the healer to do his work – until a voice of dissent was heard from the back of the room. ‘Pray reflect on the following, respected elders!’ cried Nasruddin. ‘Which is better: to see, or to be happy?’ And the healer was sent on his way. "
4 " Except, perhaps, in Iran itself. A new round of musicians had taken up their instruments, and the beat was quickening, growing louder and wilder by the minute. Men and women had gathered to dance again and were stamping like matadors, or circling one another with gazes interlocked. I moved closer, to a marble-topped bar, where the exhausted musicians had swapped their instruments for tumblers of vodka. "
― Jason Elliot , Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran
5 " Geography shapes history; men only add a little colour to its surface. "
6 " Shisha ke maida shod, tiztar misha,’ runs a Hazāra proverb: broken glass becomes sharper. "
7 " Yet it seemed just possible that in the chaos and the destruction, the trauma and the devastation, some great natural reckoning was perhaps at work, which on a human scale found expression in the catastrophe of war and which, beyond the narrow grasp of the ordinary explanations for such disasters, was merely pursuing its own organic course. To what logic did ants turn to comprehend the fall of the gardener’s spade? "
8 " Even in a country at war, you forget war because the momentum of living is too great – until like a sullen beast it bares its face as if on a vicious whim, and you are reminded of the ease with which life can be extinguished. "
9 " Aggression is the last emotion to cross their brows and the youngest are, on the contrary, almost meek, their features suggesting an untempered idealism more fitting to a gallery of poets than of soldiers. "
10 " It was easy to demonize a phenomenon outside its cultural context. Were they really as backward, I asked Tim, as stories seemed to indicate? ‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘They’re the finest minds of the fourteenth century. "
11 " Egypt and Babylon became the cultural and intellectual centres of the world. But dynastic intrigue, corruption, rebellion, and an ever sterner rule had steadily weakened the empire. "
