Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.

The novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered moral if the highest values of a society are adherence to rules and traditional mores, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, and absolute ideas of right and wrong. Any society based on the latter will find novels inherently immoral and subversive.

Trollope wrote so many novels and other works that they tend to crowd each other out.

In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it.

As soon as you bring up money, I notice, conversation gets sociological, then political, then moral.

Like most of the educated, I do harbor a fondness for the sins of my ignorant past.

I have noticed before that there is a category of acquaintanceship that is not friendship or business or romance, but speculation, fascination.