So many ghosts, and forms of fright,
Have started from their graves tonight.
They have driven sleep from mine eyes away;
I will go down to the chapel and pray. [ Longfellow ]

And then it started like a guilty thing Upon a fearful summons. [ William Shakespeare ]

Rumor, once started, rushes on like a river, until it mingles with, and is lost in the sea. [ Rivarol ]

To me, clowns aren't funny. In fact, they're kind of scary. I've wondered where this started and I think it goes back to the time I went to the circus, and a clown killed my dad. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

If I live in the Wild West days, instead of carrying a six-gun in my holster, I'd carry a soldering iron. That was if some smart-aleck cowboy said something like, Hey look. He's carrying a soldering iron! and started laughing, and everybody else started laughing, I could just say, That's right, it's a soldering iron. The soldering iron of justice. Then everyone would get real quiet and ashamed, because they made fun of the soldering iron of justice, and I could probably hit them up for a free drink. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

Once when I was in Hawaii, on the island of Kauai, I met a mysterious old stranger. He said he was about to die and wanted to tell someone about the treasure. I said, Okay, as long as it's not a long story. Some of us have a plane to catch, you know. He started telling his story, about the treasure and his life and all, and I thought: This story isn't too long. But then, he kept going, and I started thinking, Uh-oh, this story is getting long. But then the story was over, and I said to myself: You know, that story wasn't too long after all. I forget what the story was about, but there was a good movie on the plane. It was a little long, though. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

Morals are an acquirement - like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis - no man is born with them. I wasn't myself, I started poor. I hadn't a single moral. There is hardly a man in this house that is poorer than I was then. Yes, I started like that - the world before me, not a moral in the slot. Not even an insurance moral. I can remember the first one I ever got. I can remember the landscape, the weather, the - I can remember how everything looked. It was an old moral, an old second-hand moral, all out of repair, and didn't fit, anyway. But if you are careful with a thing like that, and keep it in a dry place, and save it for processions, and Chautauquas, and World's Fairs, and so on, and disinfect it now and then, and give it a fresh coat of whitewash once in a while, you will be surprised to see how well she will last and how long she will keep sweet, or at least inoffensive. When I got that mouldy old moral, she had stopped growing, because she hadn't any exercise; but I worked her hard, I worked her Sundays and all. Under this cultivation she waxed in might and stature beyond belief, and served me well and was my pride and joy for sixty-three years; then she got to associating with insurance presidents, and lost flesh and character, and was a sorrow to look at and no longer competent for business. She was a great loss to me. Yet not all loss. I sold her - ah, pathetic skeleton, as she was - I sold her to Leopold, the pirate King of Belgium; he sold her to our Metropolitan Museum, and it was very glad to get her, for without a rag on, she stands 57 feet long and 16 feet high, and they think she's a brontosaur. Well, she looks it. They believe it will take nineteen geological periods to breed her match. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]