| What a talker he is. He could persuade
a fish to come out and take a walk with him. When he is present I always
believe him -- I cannot help it. When he is gone away all the belief evaporates.
He is a most daring and majestic liar. - Mark Twain's Notebook |
 AI image created by R. Kent Rasmussen |
| Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate
terms; and yet he knows perfectly well that if I had his nuts in a steel-trap
I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap till he died. - Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1 (2010) |
 |
| I will remark, here, that James W. Paige, the little bright-eyed, alert,
smartly dressed inventor of the machine, is a most extraordinary compound
of business thrift and commercial insanity; of cold calculation and jejune
sentimentality; of veracity and falsehood; of fidelity and treachery; of
nobility and baseness; of pluck and cowardice; of wasteful liberality and
pitiful stinginess; of solid sense and weltering moonshine; of towering
genius and trivial ambitions; of merciful bowels and a petrified heart;
of colossal vanity and -- But there the opposites stop. His vanity stands
alone, sky-piercing, as sharp of outline as an Egyptian monolith. It is
the only unpleasant feature in him that is not modified, softened, compensated
by some converse characteristic. There is another point or two worth mentioning.
He can persuade anybody; he can convince nobody. He has a crystal-clear
mind as regards the grasping and concreting of an idea which has been lost
and smothered under a chaos of baffling legal language; and yet it can always
be depended upon to take the simplest half dozen facts and draw from them
a conclusion that will astonish the idiots in the asylum. It is because
he is a dreamer, a visionary. His imagination runs utterly away with him.
He is a poet; a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations are
written in steel. He is the Shakespeare of mechanical invention. In all
the ages he has no peer. Indeed, there is none that even approaches him.
Whoever is qualified to fully comprehend his marvelous machine will grant
that its place is upon the loftiest summit of human invention, with no kindred
between it and the far foothills below. - Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1 (2010) |
Also see more James W. Paige special features and articles indexed
at: http://www.twainquotes.com/paige.html
Quotations | Newspaper Articles | Special Features | Links | Search