Quote image editor
“Abruptly, then, and very quickly, she went in the farthest and most anonymous-looking of the seven or eight enclosures-which, by luck, didn’t require a coin for entrance-closed the door behind her, and, with some little difficulty, manipulated the bolt to a locked position. Without any apparent regard to the suchness of her environment, she sat down. She brought her knees together very firmly, as if to make herself a smaller, more compact unit. Then she placed her hands, vertically, over her eyes and pressed the heels hard, as though to paralyze the optic nerve and drown all images into a voidlike black. Her extended fingers, though trembling or because they were trembling, looked oddly graceful and pretty. 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 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