“[If] you are ready enough to pull my knitting to pieces, but provide none of your own, the only sock is a sock in the jaw!”

“ It is a peculiarity of knitters that they chronically underestimate the amount of time it takes to knit something. Birthday on Saturday? No problem. Socks are small. Never mind that the average sock knit out of sock-weight yarn contains about 17,000 stitches. Never mind that you need two of them. (That's 34,000 stitches, for anybody keeping track.) Socks are only physically small. By stitch count, they are immense.”

“It's hard enough for a person to keep their own socks pulled up, let alone someone else's.”

“Only let's cut out the transcendental twaddle when the whole thing is as plain as a sock on the jaw.”

“There is only one thing left for you to do,” John Sloan advised one artist. “Pull off your socks and try with your feet.”

“He stared at Avery's socks and felt an odd sense of wonder. Socks were so normal. So mundane. How could someone who pulled on socks in the morning be a serial killer? Socks were not hard or dangerous. Socks were funny; foot mittens, that's what socks were. They made a knobbly hinge of your toes and became comical sock-puppets. Surely anyone who wore socks could not truly be a threat to him or anyone else?”