Lee Siegel > Quotes

“They were learning how to perform their privacy.”
― Lee Siegel, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob

“The assimilation of taboo images to the everyday language of doing business produces a strange effect. It domesticates the taboo while at the same time making the everyday transactional world more porous, more open to the forbidden. The wolf of unbridled appetite slips into everyday convention in the sheep's clothing of commercial language.”
― Lee Siegel, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob

“Everything, taboo and familiar, occurs on the same screen.”
― Lee Siegel, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob

“The counterculture had sought to practice the idea that creative personal expression was the essence of an authentic existence. The WELL, drawing strength from the Internet culture's belief that the market contains all values, put personal expression up for sale.”
― Lee Siegel, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob

“I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleum as I had been by its plaster, paint, and paper replica in the studio; the original posed a dreadfully seductive promise in cool marble of a strangely painful loveliness, a lover's lie that death itself might in some mysterious way, because of love, be lovely.”
― Lee Siegel

“Mandel, who died in 1995, had mastered the art of packaging his interiority, an innovation that would become the driving engine behind Web culture.”
― Lee Siegel, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob

“The WELLians were learning how to turn their private experiences into a public commodity.”
― Lee Siegel, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob

“It's okay, you can do it. Because I am playing with myself as I write this, I hope you're doing the same as you read it. Otherwise there's not much point. Go ahead. Don't be shy or modest, prudish or self-conscious. That's it. It feels nice, doesn't it?”
― Lee Siegel, L'Amour dans une langue morte

“In the end, despite all your careful introspecting, you pay for following your instincts. And the more intensely and honestly you live, the more incessantly you pay. If you have become that particular, irreducible person, you get precisely what you want but no more. This is the unforgiving truth.”
― Lee Siegel