I notice that as I get rid of the protective covering of the middle years, I am more openly amused and incautious and less careful socially, and that all this makes for increasingly pleasant contacts with the world.

Write one good clean sentence and put a period at the end of it. Then write another one.

death ... so seldom happens nowadays in the awesome quiet of a familiar chamber. Most of us die violently, thanks to the advance of science and warfare. If by chance we are meant to end life in our beds, we are whisked like pox victims to the nearest hospital, where we are kept as alone and unaware as possible of the approach of disintegration.

As for the house, it is scrubbed to the tiniest mousehole before Passover, to avoid such dangers as even a forgotten cake crumb might cause. Passover dishes are probably the most interesting of any in the Jewish cuisine because of the lack of leaven and the resulting challenge to fine cooks.... Everything is doubly rich, as if to compensate for the lack of leaven... [W]oes are forgotten in the pleasures of the table, for if the Mosaic laws are rightly followed, no man need fear true poison in his belly, but only the results of his own gluttony.

Or you can broil the meat, fry the onions, stew the garlic in the red wine...and ask me to supper. I'll not care, really, even if your nose is a little shiny, so long as you are self-possessed and sure that wolf or no wolf, your mind is your own and your heart is another's and therefore in the right place.

Painting, it is true, was undergoing a series of -isms reminiscent of the whims of a pregnant woman.

At present, I myself do not know of any local witches or warlocks, but there are several people who seem to have an uncanny power over food.