“Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.”

“But I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket”

“You can keep a bunch of crabs in a shallow container, and none of them will escape. Because as soon as one of 'em tries to climb out, the others pull him back in." -Hardy”

“A world like that is not really natural, or (the thought strikes one later) perhaps it really is, only more so. Parts of it are neither land nor sea and so everything is moving from one element to another, wearing uneasily the queer transitional bodies that life adopts in such places. Fish, some of them, come out and breathe air and sit about watching you. Plants take to eating insects, mammals go back to the water and grow elongate like fish, crabs climb trees. Nothing stays put where it began because everything is constantly climbing in, or climbing out, of its unstable environment.”

“I suppose no one truly admits the existence of another person.”

“Fish in another man's pond and you will catch crabs.”