PRELUDE
THE sweetest part of a kiss is the moment just before taking.
Love is misery—sweetened with imagination, salted with tears, spiced with doubt, flavored with novelty, and swallowed with your eyes shut.
Marriage is the miracle that transforms a kiss from a pleasure into a duty, and a lie from a luxury into a necessity.
A husband is what is left of a lover, after the nerve has been extracted.
A man's heart is like a barber shop in which the cry is always, "NEXT!"
The discovery of rice-powder on his coat-lapel makes a college-boy swagger, a bachelor blush, and a married man tremble.
It takes one woman twenty years to make a man of her son—and another woman twenty minutes to make a fool of him.
By the time a man has discovered that he is in love with a woman, she is usually so fagged out waiting for the phenomenon, that she is ready to topple right over into his arms from sheer exhaustion.
A man always asks for "just one kiss"—because he knows that, if he can get that, the rest will come without asking.
Somehow, the moment a man has surrendered the key of his heart to a woman, he begins to think about changing the lock.
There are only two ages, at which a man faces the altar without a shudder; at twenty when he doesn't know what's happening to him—and at eighty when he doesn't care.
