An Unexpected Light Quotes

“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.”
― Jason Elliot, An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan

“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

“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.”
― Jason Elliot, An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan

“Shisha ke maida shod, tiztar misha,’ runs a Hazāra proverb: broken glass becomes sharper.”
― Jason Elliot, An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan

“Geography shapes history; men only add a little colour to its surface.”
― Jason Elliot, An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan

“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?”
― Jason Elliot, An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan

“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.”
― Jason Elliot, An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan