Trick or Treat! Smell My Feet! We Want Something Good to Eat!

When I was a kid, I remember having a record of Halloween Songs. Yes a vinyl record. One particular song stuck in my head so that even 30+ years latter when it gets to be Halloween these words ring in my head:

H-A-DOUBLE L-O-W-DOUBLE E-N spells Halloween!

H-A-DOUBLE L-O-W-DOUBLE E-N spells Halloween!

Over and over again...thus I never forgot how to spell the word and passed the little diddy onto my own children.

On Hallowe'en the thing you must do

Is pretend that nothingcan frighten you

An' if somethin' scares you and you want to run

Jus' let on like it's Hallowe'en fun.

-from an Early Nineteenth Century Halloween Postcard

Nothing on Earth so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night. -Steve Almond

Hold on, man. We don't go anywhere with "scary," "spooky," "haunted," or "forbidden" in the title. -From Scooby-Doo

This Halloween the most popular mask is the Arnold Schwarzenegger mask. And the best part? With a mouth full of candy you will sound just like him. -Conan O'Brien

Hark! Hark to the wind! 'Tis the night, they say,

When all souls come back from the far away-

The dead, forgotten this many a day! - Virna Sheard

Where there is no imagination there is no horror. -Arthur Conan Doyle, Sr.

There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls. -George Carlin

Charlie Brown is the one person I identify with. C.B. is such a loser. He wasn't even the star of his own Halloween special. -Chris Rock

From ghoulish and ghosties and long leggety beasties and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us! - Scottish saying

Backward, turn backward,O Time, in your flight make me a child again just for to-night!

-Elizabeth Akers Allen

$$, Fear and Politics

The trick is to stop thinking of it as your money. - An IRS Auditor

The less prudence with which others conduct their affairs, the greater prudence with which we should conduct our own affairs. - Warren Buffett

The Old One had taught him that. One need not be afraid. Fear was a thing of the mind, and if one did not offer it a place, it had none. - Louis L'Amour, The Californios

The true rule, in determining to embrace or reject anything, is not whether it has any evil in it; but whether it has more evil than good. There are few things whilly evil or wholly good. Almost everything...is an inseperable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded. - Abraham Lincoln

It doesn't matter how the people vote; what matters is who counts the votes and how they do it. - Stalin

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. - Benjamin Franklin

It doesn't matter where you are coming from...it matters where you're going to. - Arnold Schwarzenegger

I have fewer misgivings concerning our excellence in the natural, i.e. exact sciences [mathematics, atomic physics, electronics, etc.] than the field of political and social "sciences", which are by no means exact and where superficiality, lack of knowledge, even fakery cannot so easily be found out and shown up. A political columnist, a political candidate or office-holder, a professor of political science may have a long record of wrong predictions and of faulty analyses and of eloquent but ill-informed views, especially on foreign affairs; and he may very well survive as a respected oracle. An engineer on the other hand, whose design for a bridge is faulty, a mathematician or physicist whose equations do not equate will soon lose prestige and professional standing. -- Fritz Kraemer, strategic advisor to the Chief of Staff of the US Army for over 30 years

Skepticism and pessimism aren't synonymous. Skeptism calls for pessimism when optimism is excessive. But it also calls for optimism when pssimism is excessive. -- Howard Marks, Oaktree Capital Management

The Wisdom of Pooh

Quotes by one of my favorite authors: A.A.Milne

If there ever comes a day when we can't be together keep me in your heart, I'll stay there forever.
Winnie the Pooh

If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together.. there is something you must always remember. you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. but the most important thing is, even if we're apart.. i'll always be with you.
Winnie the Pooh

If the person you are talking to doesn't appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.
Winnie the Pooh

Welcome

Since high school which was some 25+ years ago, I have been a collector of quotes. For some reason I have always found solice and comfort in reading the wisdom of others. Maybe I was never sure of how to express a feeling or point of view but someone must wiser than me like Benjamin Franklin or Ronald Reagan said something so profound that someone wrote it down and saved it. Some quotes can be reflective, some just plain funny - all of them meaning different things to each reader as well. My bff at the time was the first person to ever share quotes with me and actually is probably the trigger which set me off on my way to collecting my own. It had been during a particularly difficult time in my life. Sophomore year a time of big changes for a 16 year old girl who's home life was very challenging. My bff, although a terrific writer herself - who actually has now written 3 or 4 published novels and teaches at Williams - looked to the wisedom of others to help me through my rough patch added to her own words "I love you".

It would be very poetic to be able to christen this blog with those very quotes but as I look through my files while writing this I can't find them - which is really annoying and all the more reason to start filing these all in cyberspace on my blog. Oh well, that's my reality of a cluttered life. I dedicate this blog to the man pictured above Mr. Benjamin Franklin, an avid collector of sayings - most of which he coined himself [I think he would have absolutely loved the internet] and to my high school bff for helping me find the words when I couldn't find them myself.