Maria Popova
speaker
931 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 22 Jun
Maria Popova’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It ends with death.
or indifference or divorce or whatever, but it ends.
There's no eternal love because there is no eternity allotted us.
There isn't.
I mean, maybe it is the reward, more like the recompense than a reward.
Well, I think if you're going for illumination, which is, of course, the point of writing, you need the information to make that truthful and possible.
But I also, I think it's so dangerous.
There's such a responsibility in trying to represent another person who can no longer speak for themselves, from whom you're separated by centuries and sensibilities and unimaginable cultural paradigms.
We cannot imagine what it was like to live in Kepler's day.
Right.
A time when Satan was more real to the average person than gravity.
People lived to 40.
There was no knowledge of genetics and hygiene and human rights.
I mean, unimaginable world.
This is just like a handful of things.
And I don't write biography, but I write highly biographically informed, I guess, portraits of the traits of those people that speak to me and that entwine with the traits of the other people involved.
These books are each a kind of tapestry with these different lives woven together to paint a larger picture of something else, right, that's not about the people.
And I do think the responsibility of the writer speaking for and about someone else cannot be overestimated.
Oh, absolutely.
I think we are all, to some extent, very porous.
Showing 161–180 of 931 · page 9 of 47
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