“the Female Once-Over--a process by which one woman creates a detailed profile of another woman based upon about a million subtle details of clothing, jewelry, makeup, and body type, and then decides how much of a social threat she might be. Men have a parallel process, but it's binary: Does he have beer? If yes, will he share with me?”

“Susan smiled at me, giving Molly the Female Once-Over - a process by which one woman creates a detailed profile of another woman based upon about a million subtle details of clothing, jewelry, makeup, and body type, and then decides how much of a social threat she might be. Men have a parallel process, but it's binary: Does he have beer? If yes, will he share with me?”

“She was a woman made up of details, and he saw them, every one.”

“...if he can write a book at all, a writer cannot do it by peeping over his shoulder at somebody else, any more than a woman can have a baby by watching some other woman have one. It is a genital process, and all of its stages are intra-abdominal;”

“Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.”

“Like so many irritating details of the Universe(which, come to think of it, is made up almost wholly of irritating details), the truth is much more complicated than could be adequately covered by a binary yes-or-no, good-or-bad, old-or-new summary.”