Love Quote by Anthony Trollope

“Book love” isn’t just a hobby here; it’s a credential. Trollope frames reading as a “pass,” the kind of access token Victorian society obsessively understood: you don’t simply stumble into the best rooms, you’re admitted. That word choice smuggles in a quiet argument about class and self-making. You may not be born to the drawing room, but you can earn entry to a more rarefied pleasure through devotion to books.

The religious register does double duty. By calling it the “most perfect pleasure that God has prepared,” Trollope baptizes a private, solitary act as morally legitimate delight. In an era anxious about “idle” entertainment and suspicious of pleasure for pleasure’s sake, he sidesteps puritan scolding by presenting reading as sanctioned joy, almost a sacrament of the educated life. “Purest” and “perfect” are doing heavy rhetorical lifting: they separate bookish pleasure from pleasures coded as bodily, social, or potentially corrupting. The subtext isn’t that other pleasures are evil; it’s that they’re compromised - by gossip, appetite, money, status, time. A book, by contrast, offers intensity without consequence, emotion without scandal.

Context matters: Trollope wrote at the height of mass literacy’s expansion, when novels were both wildly popular and persistently policed. He’s defending the novel-reader with an odd mix of humility and certainty: reading is not frivolous, it’s the best kind of indulgence. The line flatters readers, yes, but it also issues a challenge. If book love is a “pass,” you’re meant to use it - not to escape the world, but to claim a richer one.