Sunday quotes: The Romantics edition

I read The Romantics recently and fell a bit in love with it. I can only hope that the movie lives up to this wonderful book.

'You wanted evidence of change'
'No,' he said. 'I wanted evidence of distance.'

'How can you feel sorry for a poet,' said Tom. 'Is there anything more useless and indulgent?'
'Oh no,' Laura said. She turned to face Tom, insistent on eye contact. 'They were radicals, revolutionaries. More influential than Newton and Darwin. Without them, there would be no point-of-view, no ecstasy, no heartbreak, no novels.'
'The Romantics cannot be credited with the birth of emotion,' Tom said.
'No, but maybe, without their work, we wouldn't know how to express it.'
'That doesn't mean we wouldn't feel it,' Tom said.

That spectrum has no measure for the greatest of all carnal sins, the kind that occurs before skin touches skin, before wondering turns to yearning, yearning to having, having to holding for dear life, when two people cling to each other so desperately that even when they lie, inches apart, neither is fully satisfied until the light between them turns to darkness.