Jason Elliot

“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

“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