Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman

by Robert K. Massie

“All my life I have had this inclination to yield only to gentleness and reason—and to resist all pressure.”

She realized that people preferred to talk rather than to listen and to talk about themselves rather than anything else.

I had resolved never to love without restraint a man who would not return this love in full;

“It seems to me that I was good for something else.”)