The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise.

I searched for something to say, since you always have to fall back on words to prevent silence from speaking too loudly..

It's like a battle, trying to find the right words to say at the right time.

To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies — the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said — there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.

When a worm is suddenly illuminated and dashes like a rabbit into its burrow—to use the expression employed by a friend—we are at first led to look at the action as a reflex one.

"Defective" was a big word in our house. Many things were labeled "defective" only to miraculously turn functional once the directions had been read more thoroughly.

If you want to look for obstacles, what’s wrong is always available. But so is what’s right!

These matters should incite more urgent investigation than the technology you arrogated from your attackers. But like most primitive cultures, your reflex is one of stimulus and response: to focus entirely on the issues and actions of the moment.

Faults are beauties, when survey'd by love.

Isn't there a pleasure in criticising everything and discovering faults where other men detect beauties?

We are all of us more or less echoes, repeating involuntarily the virtues, the defects, the movements, and the characters of those among whom we live.

Each one of us finds in others the very faults others find in us

Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something — anything — as a first draft.

all the way out to always find something wrong with someone and use that to bring them down