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21 " Pilgrims from all over the world were making their way to the place deemed the pearl of the Middle East. The city was reminiscent of a modern-day Persepolis. Its buildings, like towering pillars, tested the sky’s limit. The evenly paved roads belched with the smell of new tarmac, as if a million masons woke up every morning and by hand lay asphalt one grain at a time. People of all colors, ethnicities, creed and social statuses came bearing money, knowledge or experience in order to build their legacies in the new kingdom, sprouting out of the desert. Dubai had arrived. "
― Soroosh Shahrivar , The Rise of Shams
22 " Luck is the devil with a halo "
23 " People needed proof that Utopia was nothing more than a theory, an illusion read in fictional stories. "
24 " Love was supposed to be the easiest path to divinity "
25 " The sun from far gives life. But get close to it and it burns anything down to ashes "
26 " In searching for himself, he had come to understand that he was defined by selflessness "
27 " He had never met a girl who shot an arrow straighter than Cupid did "
28 " He was Lenin in a Lamborghini. He was Gandhi with a gun "
29 " Death, one way or another, would breathe life into a new order of balance today. "
30 " And envy, envious of a time when the poet, the mystic, the scientist and the statesman were nobler than the merchant. "
31 " Mercilessness was not a bad trait to have in the corporate universe. "
32 " The timepiece had been a birthday gift from Arian, his nineteen-year-old cousin in Tehran. It was plastered with pastoral steel and had the Faravahar hieroglyph sketched on it. This ancient pictogram was the symbol of a guardian angel. A remnant of a primeval daemon designed to protect the Persians. The clock’s circumference was decorated with the flowers of life and in the middle there was a scripture written in cuneiform that read Good Deeds, Good Thoughts & Good Words. "
33 " They were nothing more than modern day pagan worshippers. Congregants of a religion built on greed and hedonism. The trading floor served as their shrine; the phones as their Holy Grail; and the clients as the prophets who would entitle them to choose between putting the next down payment on a Lamborghini or a Mercedes "
34 " Death is transcendental. And no space or time could ever prevent it from happening "
35 " We are nothing more than a dot amongst the billions of organisms on the Hillis plot "
36 " Dubai, with all of its glitz and glamour rose in the heart of the desert. "
37 " Love liberates us from all primal urges and it is because of our lack of free will and complete submissiveness that we understand it in its purest form. "
38 " The messiah arrives when it is already too late. He arrives when doomsday has already struck "
39 " Love liberates us from all primal urges "
40 " The yachts’ berth was next to the Yas Marina Circuit, where Formula 1 would come into town once a year. At night, when the lights on its orbicular architecture switched on, the circuit would radiate like a constellation of stars "