You might think, spending enough time on Instagram or Pinterest, that Susan Sontag’s primary contribution to the world was a line of inspirational postcards.
This Sontag quotation on love gets used a lot, rendered in a swirly script: “I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.” It gets shared and liked, and maybe your followers think you combed through her journals to carve out that bit of wisdom just for them.
Complicated thinkers like Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou and even Friedrich Nietzsche get reduced to paper dolls that you can dress up to insert into any scenario.