Mamacita says:  It’s Hallowe’en, and I’m ready.

Big bowl of filled treat bags for little kids:  check.

Big bowl of filled treat bags for bigger kids:  check.

Big jar of assorted body parts:  check.

Skulls:  check

Pumpkins:  check.

Forty googly-zillion ladybug beetles crawling on the ceiling:  check 

Motion-animated singing zombie on front door: check.

Bring it, kids.

1. I’ll bet living in a nudist colony takes all the fun out of Halloween. –Author Unknown

2. A grandmother pretends she doesn’t know who you are on Halloween. –Erma Bombeck

3. Nothing on Earth is so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night. –Steve Almond

4. Halloween is huge in my house and we really get into the “spirits” of things. –Dee Snider 

5. Hold on, man. We don’t go anywhere with “scary,” “spooky,” “haunted,” or “forbidden” in the title. –from Scooby-Doo

6. 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

7. Those seemingly interminable dark walks between houses, long before street-lit safety became an issue, were more adrenalizing than the mountains of candy filling the sack. Sadly Halloween, with our good-natured attempts to protect the little ones, from the increasingly dangerous traffic and increasingly sick adults, has become an utter bore. –Lauren Springer

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

9. There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery. –Joseph Conrad

10. If a man harbors any sort of fear, it makes him landlord to a ghost. –Lloyd Douglas

11. 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

12. True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about but few have seen. –Author Unknown

13. They that are born on Halloween shall see more than other folk. — Unknown

14. A house is never still in darkness to those who listen intently; there is a whispering in distant chambers, an unearthly hand presses the snib of the window, the latch rises. Ghosts were created when the first man awoke in the night. –J.M. Barrie

15. Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story. –Mason Cooley

16. Proof of our society’s decline is that Halloween has become a broad daylight event for many. –Robert Kirby

17. There is nothing that gives more assurance than a mask. –Colette

18. Look, there’s no metaphysics on earth like chocolates. –Fernando Pessoa

19. Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. — Marianne Williamson

20. You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you. — Eric Hoffer

21. Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other. — Sir Francis Bacon

22. Halloween was confusing. All my life my parents said, “Never take candy from strangers.” And then they dressed me up and said, “Go beg for it.” I didn’t know what to do! I’d knock on people’s doors and go, “Trick or treat.” “No thank you.” — Rita Rudner

23. Horror is beyond the reach of psychology. — Theodor Adorno  

24. The chief difference between Horror fans and science fiction fans lies in why they won’t walk backwards. A Horror fan won’t walk backwards because he knows he’ll be knifed by a madman. A science fiction fan won’t walk backwards because he knows he’ll step on the cat. — Aaron Allston

25. Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect Horror. — Carlos Fuentes

26. When you do find it, you’ll define horror the only way it ever really has been defined – by each reader and writer, in an individual way. — Paula Guran

27. A thousand fearful images and dire suggestions glance along the mind when it is moody and discontented with itself. Command them to stand and show themselves, and you presently assert the power of reason over imagination. — Sir Walter Scott

28. One might say that the true subject of the Horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses and oppresses. — Robin Wood

29. The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear. — Krishnamurti

30. The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. — H. P. Lovecraft

31. Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear. — Mark Twain

32. For as children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light
sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in
terror and imagine will come true. — Titus Lucretius Carus

33. One need not be a chamber to be haunted; One need not be a house; The brain has corridors surpassing Material place. — Emily Dickinson

34. Halloween is the perfect time for oozing, bubbling, eye-catching science! — Steve Spangler

35. He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. — Nietzche

36. I have never met a vampire personally, but I don’t know what might happen tomorrow. — Bela Lugosi

37. Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. — Arthur C. Clarke

38. Don’t let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter. — Oliver Goldsmith

39. Do I believe in ghosts? No, but I’m afraid of them. –Marquise du Deffand

40. Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory. —George William Curtis

41. Public opinion is like the castle ghost; no one has ever seen it, but everyone is scared of it. —Sigmund Graff

42. Fear is not the natural state of civilized people. — Aung San Suu Kyi

43. Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive — the risk to be alive and express what we really are. — Don Miguel Ruiz

44. The most destructive element in the human mind is fear. Fear creates aggressiveness. — Dorothy Thompson

45. Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win. — Stephen King

46. To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead. — Bertrand Russell

47. True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country. — Kurt Vonnegut

48. From ghoulies and ghosties and long leggety beasties and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us! – old Scottish prayer

49. A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it. — George MacDonald

50. Everybody in their own imagination decides what scary is. — Yvonne Craig

A spooktastic Halloween to you all.