Morning prayer

She held that tense, almost fetal position for a suspensory moment - then broke down. She cried for fully five minutes. She cried without trying to suppress any of the noisier manifestations of grief and confusion, with all the convulsive throat sounds that a hysterical child makes when the breath is trying to get up through a partly closed epiglottis. And yet, when finally she stopped, she merely stopped, without the painful, knifelike intakes of breath that usually follow a violent outburst-inburst. When she stopped, it was as if though some momentous change of polarity had taken place inside her mind, one that had an immediate, pacifying effect on her body. 

 

                                                                           J. D. Salinger  em Franny and Zooey (1961)