"To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does....Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become....this inability to renew themselves at the fountains of their own lives....The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality- for this can only be oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes."
from The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin