People would swallow anything, just anything at all. Apparently some people found this dismaying. He thought it was a gift, the most wonderful opportunity to take advantage of the weak-minded.

There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.

You use up everything you've got trying to give everybody what they want.

It was the old story, he realized. Everything, everybody wanted to lay claim to a piece of your soul. And if they couldn’t have it, they made you pay for it in guilt.

I saw him open his mouth wide. . . as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.

Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious.

She smiled. Everyone is greedy, she said. Even people who have all the money and power in the universe want more to protect what they already have.

It was as though, so long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice, since all people are cowards and naturally prefer any kind of treachery because it has a bland outside.

All who want me would like to eat me up, But I am too expansive and am open to all sides, desire this here and that there.

When everybody thinks you are nuts you finally just give in to their pressure and actually go nuts.

Are you spontaneously enthusiastic about everyone having everything you can have?

We're all greedy, but children make it easier to be. We feel it's only right to give them everything we can grab, even when you know that anything you feed your own child still comes out of someone else's mouth.

Everybody wants something at the expense of everybody else and nobody thinks much of the other fellow.