“Once they were men. Now they are land crabs.”

“I didn't like crab. Not at all. My stepmother had tricked my into eating a crab sandwich once in a cafe in Cromer, told me it was tuna. I'd never forgiven her.”

“Crabs, crabs, crabs. Crabs the size of beach donkeys.”

“...The men of those days...were absolutely not the same people that we are now; it was not the same race as now, in our age, really, it seems we are a different species...In those days they were men of one idea, but now we are more nervous, more developed, more sensitive; men capable of two or three ideas at once...Modern men are broader-minded - and I swear that this prevents their being so all-of-a-piece as they were in those days.”

“If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves; or there would be wars, massacres, and murders; so that in the end mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of Nature.”

“O.K. I'm running out of appetite. Let this swirl— a bit like Crab Nebula— do for now.”