Ever after (para sempre [Portuguese])

By Nora Roberts:

It's always delightful reading a book by Nora Roberts. Short story first published in December 1999. I've read this book in a few hours. The author creates love stories, full of magic, here, in this collection, based on Celtic legends. I loved to break my stressed mood with this story, in an Irish island. Nora Roberts has the power to give color and fragrance to what she writes.
An excerpt: «Before dawn she rose, afraid that if she stayed beside him any longer in the dark she would ask - more afraid that if he offered some pale substitute for love and lifetimes, she would snatched it, pitifully.»

Fifty shades freed (fifty shades, #3) (as cinquenta sombras livre [Portuguese])

By E. L. James:

The novels have improved from the first to this last book of the trilogy. This trilogy focuses on the very detailed description of erotic-sexual scenes and is poor in action. However, the book entertains romantic women and who like happy endings. The best of this story is the description of a personality disorder resulting from a trauma in a child, although this needs a better interpretation by a good psychologist.

Some quotes to ponder:

• «[Christian] (...) managing a successful business is a matter of harnessing the talent of the individuals you have at your disposal. (...) I think you would do anything you wanted since you believed.»
• «[Anastasia] I don't want to cause him more pain causing him to relive the details.»
• «[Anastasia] – You don't like makeup?/[Christian] – I really like, but I prefer what is underneath.»
• «Variety is the spice of life», by William Cowper.
• «[Christian] When you grow up with an absolutely negative self-image, judging that you are some kind of rejected person, a savage that no one can love, you think that you deserve to be beaten.»
• «[Christian as a child] I had already seen pictures of Santa Claus. But Santa Claus never brought me gifts. I was bad. Santa Claus does not give gifts to bad boys. (...) My new mom says I'm good (...). The new mom does not know. I can not tell her... but I'm bad.»
• «[Christian] Hard work, surround myself with right people, keep an eye on them closely, doubt them, if necessary. (...) It has nothing to do with luck!»
• «[Christian] (...) we get immense power when, in our secret ramblings, we convinced us that we were born to control the things.»
• «The man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of anything else to which he justly entitled.», by Andrew Carnegie.

Some musics that Christian Grey plays:

• "Requiem" by Gabriel Fauré.
• "Suffocation", prelude by Chopin.

Some songs that the characters listen to:

• "Say a little prayer", by Aretha Franklin.
• "Walk on by", by Dionne Warwick.
• “Sexy Bitch”, by David Guetta, featuring Akon.

The Christian Louboutin style shoes, that Christian Grey likes:

The amazing power of deliberate intent (o fantástico poder da intenção deliberada [Portuguese])

By Esther & Jerry Hicks:

I took two years to read this book. Why? Because I stopped several times in the exhausting, repetitive and excessive examples that the authors were giving chapter after chapter. It's a great book of good messages, but I delete from it their examples.

Some quotes that I found interesting:

• «When students are ready, the teacher appears! (...) liberate the inner struggle over the 'art of allowing'», by Louise L. Hay.
• «(...) by quieting our minds (by meditating) for 15 minutes a day, we could get the answers to what we were looking for.»
• «But you're going to be amazed to discover that when you find and deliberately keep your vibrational equilibrium in your intended path to happiness, you will also be able to attract whatever you want to be, do or have - and you can also have happiness.»
• «Life should be fun.»
• «But we never look to the past in search of better days, because we understand that what is happening now and what is to come will always give us the best that life has to offer.»
• «Life is, then, the renovation of continuous and endless focus from every vantage point.»
• «And it's only when you understand yourself how a vibrational being who is able to recognize the vibrational energy continuum that, at bottom, you are.»
• «At all times, your emotions give you an indicator of the vibrational relationship between your physical and nonphysical selves.»
• «(...) there is no substitute for the vibrational alignment with yourself.»
• «As you focus your perspective on the subject, you offer a vibrational frequency that either matches or does not correspond to the frequency that reflects how your inner self sees you.»
• «Find deliberately thoughts that cause the vibrational alignment of these two points is the only real significance of energy balance.»
• «From an energy balance state you experience the clarity, vitality, eagerness, physical well-being, abundance in all the things that you think are good and even a lush state of happiness, pleasure and joy. This is the natural state of who-you-really-are.»
• «The key to the pleasant deliberate creation is to choose the objects or subjects of your thoughts intentionally, giving careful attention to how each feeling makes you feel or how you feel it, because if you are not aware as to what a feeling makes you feel, you will not be aware of where you are positioned in the subtle vibrational range of possibilities.»
• «(...) your personal preferences (...) make you offers an emanation of vibrations (a request) and the powerful Law of Attraction responds to your emanation of vibrations with other vibrational offers that correspond to them.»
• «(...) you (...) are a vibrational being and that creates, in fact, their own reality (...) by focusing on their thoughts.»
• «The more you focus on a subject, the vibration becomes more active and this attracts what corresponds it vibrationally.»
• «Everyone and everything in the universe is consciousness, all consciousness is vibration or energy.»
• «And here comes your emotional guidance system, because your emotions are indicators of the vibrational alignment or the lack of it.»
• «Emotions (...) help you recognize the relationship between the vibration of your desire and the vibration that you are offering or emanating.»
• «(...) (remember this: a belief is no more than a recurring thought)».
• «You are (...) sending (...) signals to your future experience.»
• «The better you feel, the more you will be allowing your connection to your source.»
• «(...) deliberate choice of thoughts that cause an increasing sense of well-being (...)... All the things you want will flow quickly and easily to your life experience.»
• «(...) They are just your vibrational emanations that affect your personal life experience.»
• «You are a creator who creates from the power of your focus.»
• «(...) the release of resistance (...) will help you to shorten the time that separates the 'where you are now, at this moment' and the position of 'where you want to be.'»
• «(...) whenever you continue to blame something or someone for something, you lose power. Because this will mean that this person or thing has power over you. And nothing and no one should have this power, because no one can vibrate for you.»
• «(...) when people die (...). Usually what they say is: "My God, how I was wrong!" (...) "So much concern for anything. So much that I kept myself to live my happy life, with so much useless worry (...)".»
• «We want you climb on the scale of emotional orientation (...). That's why you're here. You are here to live, here and now.»

Histórias de um Portugal assombrado (Portuguese) (stories of a haunted Portugal)

By Vanessa Fidalgo:

A book that travels around Portugal and its history. I think it is worth reading the book, at least, by the historical and geographical information that it makes available. The author has compiled stories of haunted houses, the appearance of spirits and, in the end, tales told from north to south and islands. We get to know some mysteries that took place in Portugal.
Some quotes to think about:

• «"A call to pay attention and learn from everything that surrounds us materially and can be observed by the sensuousness." (...) "Ghosts, visions and the whole series of fantastic figures explored in literature, film and the arts in general, are attempts to materialize something that is in our minds and emotional experiences." (...) "extrasensorial stimuli (...) include integration of sensory data with not consciously or automatic perception dimensions, and that are also in the enlargement of sensory perception zones, ie the perception of sound or light frequencies below or above the normal sensory perception area." (...) "The nervous system has a normal operating state or excitement and differentiated states. These altered states (internal or external excitation of the person) can create conditions for changing states of consciousness." (...) our mind is prepared to work in cooperation or interaction with other minds (...). "(...) it is not acceptable for those who are not the same psychological 'wave'." (...) "A person only dies truly when the last who met them in life, died." (...) ghostly buildings (...) a role in the evolution of society: "they stimulate the minds and society for paths that are not known yet or are poorly explained and they lack of exploitation. (...) we can overcome us in building scenarios and unlimited spectra where we can give vent to emotions and desires that are close to the territories of our alter egos." (...) a mysterious and unknown world, which (...) attracts and seduces the man», by José Carlos Garrucho.
• «"(...) supernatural entities do not have a defined silhouette, often not even a form. They are almost always shadows of a translucent white, or black" (...)», by Joaquim Coelho.
• «(...) breaking barriers was never an easy task, and it is easy to guess that through the halls of the Faculdade de Belas-Artes [Fine Arts School] have spent many rebellious, avant-garde, revolutionary minds and not always understood by the rest of society.»
• «Even António de Oliveira Salazar has suffered from tuberculosis, having been isolated in a sanatorium at all equal to the Mon'Alto sanatorium, in the neighboring Caramulo mountains. (...) Winston Churchill, ranked Portugal with an unpleasant but illustrative epithet: "a country of tuberculosis, governed by a tuberculous".»
• «The hostel from Valongo (...). On April 25, 1974, it was plundered, occupied and vandalized and little else was remained to tell his story than its skeleton.»
• «"The memory effect is to take us to the missing people, so that we are with them, and bring them to us, to be with us."», by Father Antonio Vieira.
• «The places where we lived and grew up, where we loved and lost, (...). By way of memories, the mind easily gives them emotions, depending on the nature, positive or negative, of the experiences that experienced.»
• «(...) such myths arise from a 'creeping' of the susceptible human memory. "The crimes, especially the passion crimes, stir with our fundamental fears." (...) "we are fundamentally social beings, (...). When the supernatural intervenes, in particular, these reports become unusual, exciting, arouse our curiosity to learn more and awaken our imagination, reasons why are spread more widely in space and time".», by Maria Francisca Rebocho.
• «Errancy appears as a form of penitentiary for those who were not conspicuous by their virtue in life.»
• «"(...) only people who believe or who wish to have paranormal experiences to have them in fact because their energies attract certain types of sensory perception".», by João Pedro F.
• «(...): love is really blind and sometimes can lead to committing the worst atrocities...»
• «(...) man can not control himself when passion dominates him!»
• «"The study of world folklore - which reflects the activity, the thought of a time and of a people - is as the study of humanity. (...) the evocation of local values, private and human conceptions." (...) "the historical legend is based on real facts, but the narrator changes the truth in order to prove it.», by Jean-Pierre Bayard.
• «"The legends (...) are true mirrors of the mentality that created them." (...). "(...) myths that may possibly respond or explain their anxieties, their worries..."», by Manuela Mendonça.
• «The legends (...) are stories about (...) nobility of character (...).»
• «(...) the enchanted Moorish women (...), only in Portugal do not have the baleful feature attributed to them in other cultures. (...), some argue that they are the riches that the Arabs left behind in their flight.»
• «In general, the apparitions happen more often at 'midnight', at 'midday' or at the 'St. John evenings' - Solstice - which have a very old meaning and linked to pagan cults of ancestors. (...) St. John evening, that in which conventional wisdom said to be the evening that 'all spirits are let loose on earth' (...).»
• «In medieval times, as well as functioning as barracks, lookout post and residence of the lords of the nobility, castles were also true centers of promotion of village life, and so it was not by chance that most cities grew from these points (...). (...) cultural exchange circuit (...).»
• «In the old Quinta da Lagoa [farm of the pond], in Faia (...), (...) king Chiquito (...) loved sow discord and intrigue and had fun with the hassles of others, (...) he kept causing disparate disorders among friends, neighbors and even families with no guilty conscience.», by Fernanda Frazão.