“The cover of a book is only skin deep.” -Malcolm Kenyon Ottaway

My father came up with that one. It sounds like it makes sense until you think about it a bit. He and my mother did tons of wordplay and they would conflate adages. That’s “Don’t judge a book by its’ cover.” and “Beauty is only skin deep.” (I don’t agree with the second. The complex interiors of people have their own beauty. We just don’t have pageants for small intestines and hearts and brains.)

Don’t burn all your bridges, look before you leap and we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. We morphed those into Don’t burn your bridges before you cross them. Another I’ve heard is this:

The older we get, the more we learn
which bridges to cross, which to burn

Honestly, I am terrible at burning bridges. I think it comes from being passed around as an infant and feeling abandoned or a sense of loss and grief. I am practically incapable of really burning a bridge. At most I can put up a guardhouse with a tollbooth. Not that anyone ever tries, really. People mystify me and apparently that is not going away ever.

I love this old adage, too:

Make new friends, but keep the old
One is silver and the other gold

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: adage.