Pumpkin Carving Quotes

October, baptize me with leaves! Swaddle me in corduroy and nurse me with split pea soup. October, tuck tiny candy bars in my pockets and carve my smile into a thousand pumpkins. O autumn! O teakettle! O grace!

Tonight, Let's just carve pumpkins.

When People Ask How I’m Doing I want to say, my depression is an angry deity, a jealous god a thirsty shadow that wrings my joy like a dishrag and makes juice out of my smile. I want to say, getting out of bed has become a magic trick. I am probably the worst magician I know. I want to say, this sadness is the only clean shirt I have left and my washing machine has been broken for months, but I’d rather not ruin someone’s day with my tragic honesty so instead I treat my face like a pumpkin. I pretend that it’s Halloween. I carve it into something acceptable. I laugh and I say, “I’m doing alright.

We don’t carve pumpkins at my house…I don’t trust my children with knives. They may turn on me.

And remember, when things get tough for him, please teach him how to stop carving pumpkins . . .

Her eyes are closed when I reach the couch again. She looks so peaceful just lying there. I watch her for a moment, wishing I knew what the hell was going through her head, but I refuse to ask. I can carve pumpkins just as well as she can.

Come on, people. Doesn't anybody remember how to take a big old knife, whack open a pumpkin, scrape out the seeds, and bake it? We can carve a face onto it, but can't draw and quarter it? Are we not a nation known worldwide for our cultural zest for blowing up flesh, on movie and video screens and/or armed conflict? Are we in actual fact too squeamish to stab a large knife into a pumpkin? Wait till our enemies find out.

Yes, I’d firmly and clearly told everyone I wasn’t planning an event of any kind, but had they listened? Did they care? No. I was now hosting the guild’s biggest party of the year, all because I’d wanted to carve a damn pumpkin.

When I look at a pumpkin muffin, I see the brilliant orange glow of a sugar maple in its full autumnal glory. I see the crisp blue sky of October, so clear and restorative and reassuring. I see hayrides, and I feel Halloween just around the corner, kids dressed up in homemade costumes, bobbing for apples and awaiting trick or treat. I think of children dressed as Pilgrims in a pre-school parade, or a Thanksgiving feast, the bounty of harvest foods burdening a table with its goodness. I picture pumpkins at a farmer's market, piled happy and high, awaiting a new home where children will carve them into scary faces or mothers will bake them into a pie or stew.

October, baptize me with leaves! Swaddle me in corduroy and nurse me with split pea soup. October, tuck tiny candy bars in my pockets and carve my smile into a thousand pumpkins.

For the girls who dream of being chased through a cornfield by a masked man, then fucked in the pumpkin patch when he catches you

Her entire life, she’s been so concerned with how things seem to be. Keeping up appearances. Having it all, the house with the carved pumpkin so everybody knew they’d done it. And yet. What was it all for?

Funny how those things felt so important then. Go and see the Christmas lights, bake and assemble the gingerbread house. And – poof. They disappear into history, causing only stress and leaving no imprint, like a footstep on sand that gets washed away too swiftly. Her entire life, she’s been so concerned with how things seem to be. Keeping up appearances. Having it all, the house with the carved pumpkin so everybody knew they’d done it. And yet. What was it all for?

Finney asked everyone to carve pumpkins and light them to mark the path from the crossroad to the town. The tradition caught on, and soon crossroads all over the world opened on that one night and the mortal realm was haunted by ghosts, goblins, witches, werewolves, and vampires.

Revision and prediction seem like wastes of time. As much as I'd like to have a handle on the past and future, the moment I live in is the one I have. Here is how the moment instructs me: clouds float in front of the moon's face, lights flicker in the carved heads of pumpkins, leaves rise in the wind at random, saints go nameless, love comforts, souls sing beyond the reach of bodies.

There is an entire orchard. Hidden, tucked away. Rows and rows of magical, uncharted trees. Doorways into old, long forgotten towns. Father Time. Old Man Winter. The Tooth Fairy. Multitudes of worlds, places we never knew existed. I smile, and Jack pulls me to him. A queen, and her king. And I know, with a certainty that is knitted in my linen bones, we will spend a lifetime---Jack and I, side by side---slipping through doorways that lead to other doorways, carved into ancient, gnarled trees. Lands to explore, adventures to be had. But always together. Because there is nothing quite so wasted as a life unlived. And I intend to live mine. Fully. Unbound by the rules of others. Queen or not, we all deserve these things. Freedom. Hope. A chance to find out who we really are.

Victory was inexorable, Overbeck believed, because the Americans wanted it more, because they had trained harder in the Florida swamp heat and because they had competed more fiercely among teammates who turned pumpkin carving and card games and scavenger hunts into blood sport, because they had survived the lean years of backpack travel and diets of candy bars and queasy soup steeping with the heads of chickens, because they had ridden the coal trains until their faces were black with soot, because they had lived in rickety hotels with one hour of hot water out of 24, because they had run sprints in hotel stairways and parking lots and abandoned fields, because they ignored the disbelievers, building their sport from nothing into a consuming moment, a galvanizing instant, that would make people remember where they were and what they were doing.

In St. Patrick Town, we find the stubborn, sprightly residents all awake--the leprechaun I spoke to days before still in search of his lost pot of gold in the glen, rain clouds heavy in the distance, and rainbows gleaming above the treetops. In Valentine's Town, Queen Ruby is bustling through the streets, making sure the chocolatiers are busy crafting their confections of black velvet truffles and cherry macaroons, trying to make up for lost time, while her cupids still flock through town, wild and restless. The rabbits have resumed painting their pastel eggs in Easter Town. The townsfolk in Fourth of July Town are testing new rainbow sparklers and fireworks that explode in the formation of a queen's crown, in honor of the Pumpkin Queen who saved them all from a life of dreamless sleep. In Thanksgiving Town, everyone is preparing for the feast in the coming season, and the elves in Christmas Town have resumed assembling presents and baking powdered-sugar gingerbread cookies. And in Halloween Town, we have just enough time to finish preparations for the holiday: cobwebs woven together, pumpkins carved, and black tar-wax candles lit.

We start with a next-generation miso soup: Kyoto's famous sweet white miso whisked with dashi made from lobster shells, with large chunks of tender claw meat and wilted spinach bobbing on the soup's surface. The son takes a cube of topflight Wagyu off the grill, charred on the outside, rare in the center, and swaddles it with green onions and a scoop of melting sea urchin- a surf-and-turf to end all others. The father lays down a gorgeous ceramic plate with a poem painted on its surface. "From the sixteenth century," he tells us, then goes about constructing the dish with his son, piece by piece: First, a chunk of tilefish wrapped around a grilled matsutake mushroom stem. Then a thick triangle of grilled mushroom cap, plus another grilled stem the size of a D-sized battery, topped with mushroom miso. A pickled ginger shoot, a few tender soybeans, and the crowning touch, the tilefish skin, separated from its body and fried into a ripple wave of crunch. The rice course arrives in a small bamboo steamer. The young chef works quickly. He slices curtains of tuna belly from a massive, fat-streaked block, dips it briefly in house-made soy sauce, then lays it on the rice. Over the top he spoons a sauce of seaweed and crushed sesame seeds just as the tuna fat begins to melt into the grains below. A round of tempura comes next: a harvest moon of creamy pumpkin, a gold nugget of blowfish capped with a translucent daikon sauce, and finally a soft, custardy chunk of salmon liver, intensely fatty with a bitter edge, a flavor that I've never tasted before. The last savory course comes in a large ice block carved into the shape of a bowl. Inside, a nest of soba noodles tinted green with powdered matcha floating in a dashi charged with citrus and topped with a false quail egg, the white fashioned from grated daikon.

The long year passed slowly. Then one day, as October winds blew golden leaves around the farm, Autumn heard his mother say that even though her son was gone she would bake a pumpkin pie for Halloween. And of course she would need a pumpkin. At last an idea came to Autumn. If he could just get his mother to the barn and up to the loft she would find the magic pumpkin. Autumn began to pull at his mother’s apron. “What’s wrong with you today?” cried his mother. “I have many things to do and I have no time for playing.” But Autumn kept pulling on her apron until she was out of the house and in the barnyard. Then he ran into the barn, barking louder than he ever had. His mother followed him into the barn, where it was so dark she could not see the little dog. “Now where have you gone?” she cried. Autumn began barking again and it seemed to come from above her. She looked up and dimly saw Autumn at the top of the loft ladder, barking wildly. “What are you carrying on about up there? There’s nothing up in that old loft.” But Autumn did not stop barking. “All right, all right, I’ll come up and take a look,” she said as she began to climb the ladder. When she got to the top, the morning light lit up the corner of the loft where Autumn, smiling as much as a dog can smile, stood next to a very large pumpkin. It was one of the largest pumpkin she had ever seen. “Now, how did this pumpkin get up here?” Of course there was no one there to answer her question except Autumn and he could not talk. So she decided to use the pumpkin for the pie she planned to bake. She pulled at it and rolled it, and finally after a great effort she managed to get the magic pumpkin down the ladder and into the kitchen, where Autumn ran barking around the table. “Calm down, Autumn, and let me get to work on this pie.” As she was about to cut the stem from the pumpkin, she thought of the days when her husband carved the jack-o’-lantern for Angus. “Well, maybe I’ll just do the same.” She went to Angus’s room and found one of his old drawings. She traced a jack-o’-lantern face onto the pumpkin. Then, taking a large kitchen knife, she cut into the pumpkin. When only one eye was carved, there were streams of light. And when she carved the nose, and the smiling mouth, great shafts of light like sunbeams filled the room. Again Autumn began to bark. But when she turned to quiet him, there, standing in the wonderful light, was her son.

I Can't Make You Love Me.' Bonnie Raitt." "Oh,Fiorella." I glared at him a little as I climbed down. "Was that delightful list for your benefit or mine?" Frankie grabbed my hand and, when I didn't pull away fast enough, tugged me onto his lap,where he wrapped his arms so tightly around me that I couldn't escape. Sometimes his strength still surprises me.He tickled my cheek with his nose. "Don't hate me just because I'm hateful." "I never do." Here's the thing. Frankie's taken a lot of hits in his life. He never stays down for long. "Excuse me!" The mannequin's evil twin was glaring down at us fro her sky-high bootie-heeled heights. Her NM badge told us her name was Victoria. "You cannot do that here!" she snapped. "Do what?" Frankie returned, matching lockjaw snooty for lockjaw snooty. She opened and closed her mouth, then hissed, "Canoodle!" I felt Frankie's hiccup of amusement. "Were we canoodling, snookums?" he asked me. "I rather thought we were about to copulate like bunnies." I couldn't help it; I laughed out loud. Victoria's mouth thinned into a pale line. The whole thing might have ended with our being escorted out the store's hallowed doors by security. Sadie, as she so often did, momentarily saved us from ourselves. She stomped out of the dressing room and planted herself in front of us. Ignoring the angry salesgirl completely, she muttered, "I look like a carved pumpkin!" Frankie took in the skirt, layered shirts, and jacket. "You do not, but I might have been having an overly Michael Kors moment. This will not do for a date.Take it off." He nudged me, then added, "Right here.Every last stitch of it." As soon as Sadie was back in her own clothing and coat-which got an unwilling frown of respect from Victoria; apparently even Neiman Maruc doesn't carry that line-we moved on. Sadie did better in Frankie's second choice-a lip-printed sweater dress from Betsey Johnson,but wouldn't buy it. "We're just going to a movie!" she protested. "Besides,Jared's not...not..." She gestured down at her lippy hips. "He's practical and sensible and quiet." "Oh,my God!" Frankie slapped both palms to the side of his face,and turned to me. "Sadie has a date with a Prius!" He had to invoke the sanctity of Truth or Dare before he could even get her into Urban Outfitters. "Sometimes I love you less than other times," she grumbled as he filled her arms with his last choices. "No,you don't," he said cheerfully, and sent her off to change.

My face. I was used to getting second glances, and now I was getting second, third and fourth glances, but not ones of appreciation. My face looked like a Halloween pumpkin that had been carved by an angry person wearing a blindfold.

October, baptize me with leaves! Swaddle me in corduroy and nurse me with split pea soup. October, tuck tiny candy bars in my pockets and carve my smile into a thousand pumpkins. O autumn! O teakettle! O grace! <

How should I feel about the stranger in the pumpkin mask? How should I feel about him chasing me through a field like a predator would chase his prey? That’s what I was tonight, his prey, and I think I fucking loved it.

The man wearing the pumpkin mask chuckles. His laugh is deep, haunting me to my core as he releases it. Waves of chills roll down my spine, and I break out into a cold sweat. His voice comes smooth and firm, perhaps even sexy in the most wrong of ways. “Run, little nightmare.

Windows 7 is like a pumpkin: handsome and plump on the outside, but a big mess on the inside. So get out your knife and start carving.

When we got home, Daddy was carving a pumpkin for our Halloween party. Clifford was a nosy little puppy. Now we had a jack-o’-lantern that barked and stuck out its tongue.

What are you doing behind my cornstalks? There was to be no pumpkin-pie-eating for you,” said the angry voice of the spirit that lived in the scarecrow. Shaking with fear, Angus turned to face the scarecrow, and the pie fell to the earth. “I…I was hungry and didn’t think Mom would mind,” said Angus. But Angus’s excuse only made the spirit angrier, and he shouted at Angus. “You were told to go to bed and to eat no pie.” And swinging the great scarf he wore like long arms flapping in the wind, the scarecrow turned Angus into a little dog. “Because you now have fur the color of fallen leaves, you will be called Autumn,” the scarecrow said as he made another swirl of his great scarf. “And because you stole and ate your mother’s pie, every night you will climb the ladder to the barn loft and guard a magic pumpkin until a forgiving soul carves it and releases the power to change you back to a boy.” The scarecrow spirit spoke in a voice as chilling as the cold which ruffled the cornstalks standing beneath him. As Autumn ran back to the farm he tried to think of a way to get someone up to the loft to carve the magic pumpkin. But thinking is not easy when you have just been changed into dog. So no ideas came to him. Great sadness now fell over the farm and the daily tasks were done with little joy. “Maybe Angus just ran away,” Angus’s mother said in a voice full of sorrow. “Or maybe he’s been taken over the fields by an angry spirit,” said his father. “Well, at least we have him,” the mother said, pointing to the playful little dog that had suddenly come to the farm and during the day always kept her company. But when evening came Autumn slipped away and sadly climbed the steep ladder to the barn loft. There he lay with his head next to the magic pumpkin, guarding it through the night. Sometimes he thought he could almost hear sounds from deep within the pumpkin. As if messages from the sun and the moon somehow entered through the pumpkin’s stem to rest among the silent seeds.

When Franci walked in the house a few hours later, she encountered one of the biggest messes she’d ever seen. Newspapers were spread over the island in the kitchen, covered with pumpkin guts. She could see the spills on the floor—seeds that had gotten away—and three pumpkins were in the middle of the carving process on the dining room table. One huge, one large and one small. The pumpkin family. “Nuts,” Sean said. “You’re home early. We were going to surprise you. We’ve gotta have jack-o’-lanterns for Halloween!” “Mama!” Rosie shouted excitedly. Then pointing, she said, “Daddy, Mommy, Rosie!” “Were you going to surprise me with the cleanup?” she asked hopefully. “Of course,” he said. “Maybe you should just go to your room and read or something until I have a chance to get things under control.” “I’ll go change and then come and help,” she said.

Jack taps a finger on the broad tree with a perfect heart, painted a buttery pink, carved at the center.

With its ninety-foot granite walls, rushing waterfalls, and boardwalks, the Flume was the ultimate nature walk, and one of my favorite places to visit as a kid. When I saw the sign for it on the side of the highway—dark wood with carved, yellow bubble letters—I let out an audible squeal of glee.

Maybe you’ve had moments like these. You know, when you’re tired and run-down and you let your mind go where it shouldn’t? Loneliness and clinical depression can flay you alive or put you on the rack and not only crack your bones and joints but steal your soul. Here, see for yourself. The sun is orange, the sky blue, the sugarcane across the bayou swaying and clattering like broomsticks. But the sun has no warmth, nor the strength to regenerate itself, and it makes me think of a Halloween pumpkin that has been carved too thin, its candle guttering, the inside of its shell scorched and cracked like old skin, when dust devils climb into the sky and scatter ashes and dust on the bayou’s surface. I try to avoid thoughts such as these and concentrate on the natural gifts of the world and the sublimity of the afternoon. The air is tannic, as moist and pure as cave air, like pine needles and sugarcane stubble plowed under black soil, like an autumnal emanation from the pen of John Keats. I remind myself that the world is a fine place and worth the fighting for, as Ernest Hemingway wrote in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

It was a beautiful fall day at the soccer fields when I met Stacy for the first time. The game had just begun when she arrived carrying homemade pumpkin spice muffins with cream cheese frosting for everyone, photos of the jack-o’-lantern she had elaborately carved earlier that morning into the shape of a witch stirring a bubbling cauldron with the rising steam spelling out the word “Boo,” enough material and glue for each of the siblings not playing soccer to make adorable “easy no-sew” bat wings as a fun craft to fill their time, as well as little gift bags for every mother full of Halloween-themed wine charms and sleep masks that were embroidered with “Sleeping for a spell.” Besides her generous gifts, she also looked terrific. She was wearing the perfect fall outfit with just the right number of layers and textures and cool boots. Her hair was beautifully twisted into a loose braid casually thrown over one shoulder. While everyone sat in their lawn chair and screamed at their kid to “attack the ball,” Stacy ran up and down the sidelines taking (no doubt fabulous) photos of her son and overseeing the siblings’ craft bonanza. At this point I should also mention, in case you don’t feel bad enough about yourself, that Stacy has a full-time job outside the home. Like a really important one. I’m not sure what she does exactly, but from the thirty seconds that she slowed down long enough to talk to me, I learned that she works fifty hours a week or so and travels around the country every few days and then comes home and makes her kids pancakes in the shape of clovers for breakfast, because it’s International Clover Day or some shit like that.

Lucy turned her pumpkin around. She’d carved a face with scary, triangular-eyes, a triangular nose and a jagged mouth with sharp teeth. “Your pumpkin looks constipated,” I said. I don’t think Lucy appreciated my comment because after I said it, she took her knife and stabbed it into my pumpkin.

He carved me out like a pumpkin. Made me spill all my thoughts, secrets, dreams, until he knew everything. Then October passed us quietly and he left me on his doorstep to rot.

You want another confession?” I nod, captive in his hands. “I never had a real girlfriend until you. You were my first and only.” His eyes are earnest, his words ripping at my heart when he speaks. “A flirtation, dinners, sex, but nothing more, and Alicia was…a distraction. She was kind and tried to take care of me no matter how much I resisted, but it wasn’t real, we didn’t share a life,” he runs his thumbs along my jaw, “not carving pumpkins, or a turkey, or picking out a Christmas tree, meeting the parents. And I never thought I would ever want these things, but I do. And I want to do these things with you.

<> A hazelnut. A filbert. October, baptize me with leaves! Swaddle me in corduroy and nurse me with split pea soup. October, tuck tiny candy bars in my pockets and carve my smile into a thousand pumpkins. O autumn! O teakettle! O grace!

Jack stepped through a wall of flames, looking like a demon from Hell as smoke writhed around his legs. My breath quickened when he loomed over me, cocking his pumpkin head while his carved grin turned sadistic.

Scream, moan, beg for it to stop when we both know you want to ride this pumpkin, princess,

I might die if I don’t get a pumpkin spice latte in me RIGHT NOW.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I’m about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash. I may even throw some multi-colored leaves into the mix, all haphazard like a crisp October breeze just blew through and fucked that shit up. Then I’m going to get to work on making a beautiful fucking gourd necklace for myself. People are going to be like, “Aren’t those gourds straining your neck?” And I’m just going to thread another gourd onto my necklace without breaking their gaze and quietly reply, “It’s fall, fuckfaces. You’re either ready to reap this freaky-assed harvest or you’re not.” Carving orange pumpkins sounds like a pretty fitting way to ring in the season. You know what else does? Performing an all-gourd reenactment of an episode of Diff’rent Strokes—specifically the one when Arnold and Dudley experience a disturbing brush with sexual molestation. Well, this shit just got real, didn’t it? Felonies and gourds have one very important commonality: they’re both extremely fucking real. Sorry if that’s upsetting, but I’m not doing you any favors by shielding you from this anymore. The next thing I’m going to do is carve one of the longer gourds into a perfect replica of the Mayflower as a shout-out to our Pilgrim forefathers. Then I’m going to do lines of blow off its hull with a hooker. Why? Because it’s not summer, it’s not winter, and it’s not spring. Grab a calendar and pull your fucking heads out of your asses; it’s fall, fuckers. Have you ever been in an Italian deli with salamis hanging from their ceiling? Well, then you’re going to fucking love my house. Just look where you’re walking or you’ll get KO’d by the gauntlet of misshapen, zucchini-descendant bastards swinging from above. And when you do, you’re going to hear a very loud, very stereotypical Italian laugh coming from me. Consider yourself warned. For now, all I plan to do is to throw on a flannel shirt, some tattered overalls, and a floppy fucking hat and stand in the middle of a cornfield for a few days. The first crow that tries to land on me is going to get his avian ass bitch-slapped all the way back to summer. Welcome to autumn, fuckheads!