Helium Quotes

My chest feels full of glitter and helium, the way it used to when I was little and riding my father's shoulders at twilight, when I knew that if I held up my hands and spread my fingers like a net, I could catch the coming stars.

She asks me to kill the spider. Instead, I get the most peaceful weapons I can find. I take a cup and a napkin. I catch the spider, put it outside and allow it to walk away. If I am ever caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, just being alive and not bothering anyone, I hope I am greeted with the same kind of mercy.

When things get too heavy, just call me helium, the lightest known gas to man.

The difference between a garden and a graveyard is only what you choose to put in the ground

You sounded like Dolly parton on helium." (After kristy lee cook of season 7 on american idol,sang her country rendition of the Beatles'"Eight Days A Week.)

Some days I forget that my skin is not a panic room.

Listen, kid. This is what happens: Somebody-girl usually-got a free spirit, doesn't get on too good with her parents. These kids, they're like tied-down helium balloons. They strain against the string and strain against it, and then something happens, and that string gets cut, and they just fly away. And maybe you never see the balloon again. It lands in Canada or somethin', gets work at a restaurant, and before the balloon even notices, it's been pouring coffee in that same dinner to the same sad bastards for thirty years. Or maybe three or four years from now or three or four days from now, the prevailing winds take the balloon back home, because it needs money, or it sobered up, or it misses its kid brother. But listen, kid, that string gets cut all the time." "Yeah, bu-" "I'm not finished, kid. The thing about these balloons is that there are so goddamned many of them. The sky is choked full of them, rubbing up against one another as they float to here or from there, and every one of those damned balloons ends up on my desk, one way or another, and after awhile a man can get discouraged. Everywhere the balloons, and each of them with a mother and father, or God forbid both, and after a while, you can't even see'em individually. You look up at all the balloons in the sky and you can see all of the balloons, but you cannot see any one balloon.

I laugh, and it sounds like I've been sucking helium.

A joke: What do you do with a sick chemist? Helium. Or curium. Or barium.

When you choose to be a poet, you become a place that people walk through and then leave when they are ready

Loving you was the last thing I felt really good at.

He sketches you as the antagonist and suddenly his transgressions become deleted scenes. He blames you for his sadness. And this is how the wolf cries boy.

you wouldn't let me love both of us at the same time

My hobbies include: editing my life story, hiding behind metaphors, and trying to convince my shadow that I’m someone worth following.

Theophilus Crowe's mobile phone played eight bars of "Tangled Up in Blue" in an irritating electronic voice that sounded like a choir of suffering houseflies, or Jiminy Cricket huffing helium, or, well, you know, Bob Dylan.

Being black is one of the most extreme sports in America. We don't need to invent new ways of risking our lives because the old ones have been working for decades.

Our “ego” or self-conception could be pictured as a leaking balloon, forever requiring the helium of external love to remain inflated, and ever vulnerable to the smallest pinpricks of neglect.

Hope is a helium balloon. It is a wish lantern set out into the dark sky of night.

You see, the chemists have a complicated way of counting: instead of saying "one, two, three, four, five protons," they say, "hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron.

Youth promises us immortality, but doesn't have the means to uphold its end of the bargain.

And the answer is not every building that shakes will collapse. The answer is not everything that chips will crumble.

I’m just sorry that she had to be your fortune cookie. Broken so you could learn a lesson you already should’ve known.

Love is a helium-based emotion; Love always takes the high road.

You are mean because inside you’re tiny. So tiny you cannot hold up the weight of your own body. You must inflate your ego just to fill the skin. You float around like a helium balloon. Blown up and bloated and gassy and empty.

I always figured nerves were for Jane Austen characters and helium-voiced girls who never buy their round; I would no more have turned shaky in a crisis than I would have carried smelling salts around in my reticule.

I can't blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I've spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I'll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children.

We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.

I hope I haven’t already driven past my greatest moments. I hope there is something beautiful on the horizon that’s just as impatient as I am. Something so eager, it wants to meet me halfway. A moment that is diligently staring at its watch, trembling with nervousness, frustrated, and bursting at the seams, wondering what’s taking me so long to arrive.

Let's sing loudly, offbeat and out of tune. Let the world know we don't care how it sounds because the only key we need is already in the ignition.

If I could I would nail these hands to the edges of stars. I would sacrifice this body to the sky hoping to resurrect as someone spiteful enough to not care about you.

That feeling that's half doubt - But half hope, too. And it feels like your heart's a helium balloon that's going to float away? Or just... pop?

They now know solitude does not scare people like us and our absence is something that we are not afraid to give to those who call for it.

I am learning that the difference between a garden and a graveyard is only what you choose to put in the ground.

Remember, every year two million people die of dehydration. So it doesn’t matter if the glass is half full or half empty. There’s water in the cup. Drink it and stop complaining.

I promise I will love you as if it’s the only thing I’ve ever done correctly.

As the station wagon pulled back onto the highway, the sun was slowly sinking below the horizon like a leaky boat. Well, except for that fact that boats are not generally round, orange and on fire. Hmm. Come to think of it, in no way whatsoever did the sun, in this instance, resemble a leaky boat. My apologies. That was a dreadful attempt at simile. Please allow me to try again. As the station wagon pulled back onto the highway, the sun was slowly sinking below the horizon like a self-luminous, gaseous sphere comprised mainly of of hydrogen and helium.

Do you know the human body is approximately sixty percent water? When I walk into a room full of people, all I see is an ocean.

I've never been in the military, but I have a purple heart: I got it from beating myself up over things that I can't fix.

I wonder how long it will take the planet to tell us we can’t live here and the locks are changed.

He felt like a helium balloon straining skyward on a slender string.

So here we were, fifty men and fifty women, with IQs over 150 and bodies of unusual health and strength, slogging elitely through the mud and slush of central Missouri, reflecting on the usefulness of our skill in building bridges on worlds where the only fluid is an occasional standing pool of liquid helium.

She tells me about dreams. She says my dreams are helium and balloons, and I've made the mistake of letting go a few to many times, but I still got this one. Tied around my finger like a wedding ring because even though I don't believe in marriages, I'm gonna bring this one home.

I have an odd fascination with sandcastles and ice sculptures: things that will only last a few moments. That’s also why I fall in love with women who will never love me back.

Five: Cupid is irresponsible, and I’m tired of him using me for target practice.

I came to get you. I knew you'd freak out." "But..." My head still feels like a helium balloon. "Why?" Nick looks blank. "Because you always freak out." I shake my head. My voice feels like I've swallowed it. "I mean, why do you care if I freak out?" There's a long silence. "Well," Wilbur finally bursts, "I can take a shot in the dark, if you want." "Seriously," Nick snaps, making his fingers into a gun shape. "I'm going to take a shot in the dark in a minute and it will make contact." Wilbur looks charmed. "Isn't he adorable?" he says fondly. "My duty as Fairy Godmother is complete, anyhoo, and I believe it's time to spread my magic dust elsewhere. So many pumpkins after all; so little time.

i am constantly telling him that i'm not sure the laws of sex and the city apply when there's no sex and there's no city, but then he looks at me like i'm throwing spiked darts at the heart-shaped helium balloons that populate his mind, so i let it go

sweaty palms. check. shaky bones. check. the feeling that all oxygen in the air has been replaced by helium. yup.

To Have Without Holding: Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, love with the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the wind roaring and whimpering in the rooms rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds that thwack like rubber bands in an open palm. It hurts to love wide open stretching the muscles that feel as if they are made of wet plaster, then of blunt knives, then of sharp knives. It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch, to love and let go again and again. It pesters to remember the lover who is not in the bed, to hold back what is owed to the work that gutters like a candle in a cave without air, to love consciously, conscientiously, concretely, constructively. I can't do it, you say it's killing me, but you thrive, you glow on the street like a neon raspberry, You float and sail, a helium balloon bright bachelor's buttons blue and bobbing on the cold and hot winds of our breath, as we make and unmake in passionate diastole and systole the rhythm of our unbound bonding, to have and not to hold, to love with minimized malice, hunger and anger moment by moment balanced.

Chicken,' Josie said. 'Have you ever been in love?' Peter looked at Josie, and thought of how they had once tied a note with their addresses to a helium balloon and let it go in her backyard, certain it would reach Mars. Instead, they had received a letter from a widow who lived two blocks away. 'Yeah,' he said. 'I think so.

Tied to my reading lamp was a single balloon. Filled with helium, it floated in a morning sunray which slanted in through one of the high windows. On it was a picture of my face, the eyes gone, blood running down from the ragged sockets, a scream distorting the mouth on the balloon's thin and bulging rubber skin. I looked at it and I screamed.

They now know solitude does not scare people like us

Volcano surfing is a sport in which a person rides down an active volcano at speeds up to 50 miles per hour using nothing but a wooden board. When I heard about this activity, I thought to myself, it must be nice to feel so safe, you have to invent new ways to put yourself in danger.

Tell me how blessed we are to have tragedy / so small it can fit on the tips of our tongues. (from 'Complainers')

Stars are fires that burn for thousands of years. Some of them burn slow and long, like red dwarfs. Others-blue giants-burn their due so fast they shine across great distances, and are easy to see. As they Starr to run out of fuel,they burn helium, grow even hotter, and explode in a supernova. Supernovas, they're brighter than the brightest galaxies. They die, but everyone watches them go.

These kids, they're like tied-down helium balloons. They strain against the string and strain against it, and then something happens, and that string gets cut, and they just float away. (...) But once that string gets cut, kid, you can't uncut it.

it must be nice to feel so safe, you have to invent new ways to put yourself in danger.

am learning that this body is not a shotgun. I am learning that this body is not a pistol. I am learning that a man is not defined by what he can destroy.

While researching this answer, I managed to lock up my copy of Mathematica several times on balloon-related differential equations, and subsequently got my IP address banned from Wolfram|Alpha for making too many requests. The ban-appeal form asked me to explain what task I was performing that necessitated so many queries. I wrote, “Calculating how many rental helium tanks you’d have to carry with you in order to inflate a balloon large enough to act as a parachute and slow your fall from a jet aircraft.” Sorry, Wolfram.

...ideas are definitely unstable, they not only CAN be misused, they invite misuse--and the better the idea the more volatile it is. That's because only the better ideas turn into dogma, and it is this process whereby a fresh, stimulating, humanly helpful idea is changed into robot dogma that is deadly. In terms of hazardous vectors released, the transformation of ideas into dogma rivals the transformation of hydrogen into helium, uranium into lead, or innocence into corruption. And it is nearly as relentless. The problem starts at the secondary level, not with the originator or developer of the idea but with the people who are attracted by it, who adopt it, who cling to it until their last nail breaks, and who invariably lack the overview, flexibility, imagination, and most importantly, sense of humor, to maintain it in the spirit in which it was hatched. Ideas are made by masters, dogma by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road. There is a particularly unattractive and discouragingly common affliction called tunnel vision, which, for all the misery it causes, ought to top the job list at the World Health Organization. Tunnel vision is a disease in which perception is restricted by ignorance and distorted by vested interest. Tunnel vision is caused by an optic fungus that multiplies when the brain is less energetic than the ego. It is complicated by exposure to politics. When a good idea is run through the filters and compressors of ordinary tunnel vision, it not only comes out reduced in scale and value but in its new dogmatic configuration produces effects the opposite of those for which it originally was intended. That is how the loving ideas of Jesus Christ became the sinister cliches of Christianity. That is why virtually every revolution in history has failed: the oppressed, as soon as they seize power, turn into the oppressors, resorting to totalitarian tactics to "protect the revolution." That is why minorities seeking the abolition of prejudice become intolerant, minorities seeking peace become militant, minorities seeking equality become self-righteous, and minorities seeking liberation become hostile (a tight asshole being the first symptom of self-repression).

Change is the nature of nature,'" she read. "'For example, stars expand as they grow older. They grow from a star, to a red super-giant, to a supernova. When a massive star explodes at the end of its life, the explosion dispenses different elements-helium, carbon, oxygen, iron, nickel-across the universe, scattering starduest. That stardust now makes up the planets, including ours.

The word “repurpose” means to take an object and give it amnesia. It means to make something forget what it’s been trained to do so you can use it for a better reason. I am learning that this body is not a shotgun. I am learning that this body is not a pistol. I am learning that a man is not defined by what he can destroy. I am learning that a person who only knows how to fight can only communicate in violence and that shouldn’t be anyone’s first language. I am learning that the difference between a garden and a graveyard is only what you choose to put in the ground.

All the elements other than hydrogen and helium make up just 0.04 percent of the universe. Seen from this perspective, the periodic system appears to be rather insignificant. But the fact remains that we live on the earth… where the relative abundance of elements is quite different.

Alternatives to “Bae” The one who wins all of the arguments, the keeper of the remote, the girl who turns my stomach into a butterfly nest, the pink Starburst, the one I will always choose first no matter what else is in the pack, the red Kool-Aid, the right amount of sugar, the pulp, the part that makes the juice seem real.

I wonder how long it took to convince the first rifle that it could hold a note instead of a bullet, but still fire into a crowd and make everyone move

When People Ask How I’m Doing I want to say, my depression is an angry deity, a jealous god a thirsty shadow that wrings my joy like a dishrag and makes juice out of my smile. I want to say, getting out of bed has become a magic trick. I am probably the worst magician I know. I want to say, this sadness is the only clean shirt I have left and my washing machine has been broken for months, but I’d rather not ruin someone’s day with my tragic honesty so instead I treat my face like a pumpkin. I pretend that it’s Halloween. I carve it into something acceptable. I laugh and I say, “I’m doing alright.

Rosette disappeared onto the dance floor. Wells sat in silence for a minute, watching the dancers. The worldwide cult of fast money spent stupidly. The worldwide cult of trying too hard. Moscow, Rio, Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York, London, Shanghai--the story was the same everywhere. The same overloud music, the same overpromoted brand names, the same fake tits, about as erotic as helium balloons. Everywhere an orgy of empty consumption and bad sex. Las Vegas was the cult's world headquarters, Donald Trump its patron saint. Wells had spent ten years in the barren mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He never wanted to live there again. But if he had to choose between an eternity there or in the supposed luxury of this club, he'd go back without a second thought.

Pink Balloons My name is Olivia King I am five years old My mother bought me a balloon. I remember the day she walked through the front door with it. The curly hot pink ribbon trickling down her arm, wrapped around her wrist . She was smiling at me as she untied the ribbon and wrapped it around my hand. "Here Livie, I bought this for you." She called me Livie. I was so happy . I'd never had a balloon before. I mean, I always saw balloon wrapped around other kids wrist in the parking lot of Wal-Mart , but I never dreamed I would have my very own. My very own pink balloon. I was excited! So ecstatic! So thrilled! i couldn't believe my mother bought me something! She'd never bought me anything before! I played with it for hours . It was full of helium and it danced and swayed and floated as I drug it around from room to room with me, thinking of places to take it. Thinking of places the balloon had never been before. I took it in the bathroom , the closet , the laundry room , the kitchen , the living room . I wanted my new best friend to see everything I saw! I took it to my mother's bedroom! My mothers Bedroom? Where I wasn't supposed to be? With my pink balloon... I covered my ears as she screamed at me, wiping the evidence off her nose! She slapped me across the face as she told me how bad I was! How much I misbehaved! How I never listened! She shoved me into the hallways and slammed the door, locking my pink balloon inside with her. I wanted him back! He was my best friend! Not her! The pink ribbon was still tied around my wrist so I pulled and pulled , trying to get my new best friend away from her. And it popped. My name is Eddie. I'm seventeen years old. My birthday is next week. I'll be big One-Eight. My foster dad is buying me these boots I've been wanting. I'm sure my friends will take me out to eat. My boyfriend will buy me a gift, maybe even take me to a movie. I'll even get a nice little card from my foster care worker, wishing me a happy eighteenth birthday, informing me I've aged out of the system. I'll have a good time. I know I will. But there's one thing I know for sure I better not get any shitty ass pink balloons!

On the day you couldn't hold yourself together anymore, you called for me, voice crackling like two sets of knuckles before an altercation. I found you, looking like a damaged wine glass. I hugged your shatter, I cut all of my fingers trying to jigsaw puzzle you back together. When it was over, you looked at the stains on the carpet and blamed me for making a mess.

A few years after I gave some lectures for the freshmen at Caltech (which were published as the Feynman Lectures on Physics), I received a long letter from a feminist group. I was accused of being anti-women because of two stories: the first was a discussion of the subtleties of velocity, and involved a woman driver being stopped by a cop. There's a discussion about how fast she was going, and I had her raise valid objections to the cop's definitions of velocity. The letter said I was making the women look stupid. The other story they objected to was told by the great astronomer Arthur Eddington, who had just figured out that the stars get their power from burning hydrogen in a nuclear reaction producing helium. He recounted how, on the night after his discovery, he was sitting on a bench with his girlfriend. She said, "Look how pretty the stars shine!" To which he replied, "Yes, and right now, I'm the only man in the world who knows how they shine." He was describing a kind of wonderful loneliness you have when you make a discovery. The letter claimed that I was saying a women is incapable of understanding nuclear reactions. I figured there was no point in trying to answer their accusations in detail, so I wrote a short letter back to them: "Don't bug me, Man!

Our Sun is not Earth’s true “mother.” Although many peoples of Earth have worshipped the Sun as a god that gave birth to Earth, this is only partially correct. Although Earth was originally created from the Sun (as part of the ecliptic plane of debris and dust that circulated around the Sun 4.5 billion years ago), our Sun is barely hot enough to fuse hydrogen to helium. This means that our true “mother” sun was actually an unnamed star or collection of stars that died billions of years ago in a supernova, which then seeded nearby nebulae with the higher elements beyond iron that make up our body. Literally, our bodies are made of stardust, from stars that died billions of years ago.

The light in that room was a glow; I seem to remember the color green, or perhaps flowers. A pale green sheet covered his inert body but not his head, which lay (eyes closed, mouth set in a tense and terrible grimace) unmoving. Gianluca. Barely able to see, barely able to stand - my knees kept buckling – and breathing so quietly I thought that I, too, might die; that out of shock, I would just drift away, the shell of my body cracking open. No longer anchored by my brother’s love, I would be reabsorbed by sky. Gianluca. If there was never another sound in the world, I would understand – yes, that would be appropriate, it would be fitting. This was the antithesis of music, the antithesis of noise. My brother’s death seemed to demand silence of all the world. Gianluca.

They will push you away, tell you to leave, but have no idea how good you are at following instructions.

They now know solitude does not scare people like us and our absence is something that we are not afraid to give to those who call for it.

The word “repurpose” means to take an object and give it amnesia.

Simeona My mother wears her wrinkles the way an ocean wears a wave. She is the only body of water that refuses to let me drown

Most people have no idea that tragedy and silence often have the exact same address.

How to identify love by knowing what it's not: love doesn't use a fist. Love never calls you fat or lazy or ugly. Love doesn’t laugh at you in front of friends. It is not in Love’s interest for your self-esteem to be low. Love is a helium-based emotion; Love always takes the high road. Love does not make you beg. Love does not make you deposit your paycheck into its bank account. Love certainly never, never, never brings the children into it. Love does not ask or even want you to change. But if you change, Love is as excited about this change as you are, if not more so. And if you go back to the way you were before you changed, Love will go back with you. Love does not maintain a list of your flaws and weaknesses. Love believes you.

...because there will never be any boy's wrist to tie the balloon of your helium heart to (it has floated high far away from the heavy stone of that unnameable boy in chicago), you would never be with someone and then someone else, and you would definitely never be someone to someone else's else.

If only we could always say our truths--if we could name the things that haunt us--maybe they could float up from us like the kind of helium that the birds would sip in the treetops. Then they would make us laugh and laugh.

We would be in each other's lives again. No, he hadn't been the best father, but he was my father, and we loved each other. We needed each other. Though he'd disappointed me countless times through the years, life had already proven too short for me to hold on to that. So I let go of my hurt. I let go years of frustration between us. Most of all, I let go of any desire to change my father and I accepted him for who he was. I took all of my anguish and released it like a fistful of helium balloons to the sky, and I chose to forgive him.

On May 26th, 2003, Aaron Ralston was hiking, a boulder fell on his right hand, he waited four days, he then amputated his own arm with a pocketknife. On New Year’s Eve, a woman was bungee jumping, the cord broke, she fell into a river and had to swim back to land in crocodile-infested waters with a broken collarbone. Claire Champlin was smashed in the face by a five-pound watermelon being propelled by a slingshot. Mathew Brobst was hit by a javelin. David Striegl was actually punched in the mouth by a kangaroo. The most amazing part of these stories is when asked about the experience they all smiled, shrugged and said “I guess things could’ve been worse.” So go ahead, tell me you’re having a bad day. Tell me about the traffic. Tell me about your boss. Tell me about the job you’ve been trying to quit for the past four years. Tell me the morning is just a townhouse burning to the ground and the snooze button is a fire extinguisher. Tell me the alarm clock stole the keys to your smile, drove it into 7 am and the crash totaled your happiness. Tell me. Tell me how blessed are we to have tragedy so small it can fit on the tips of our tongues. When Evan lost his legs he was speechless. When my cousin was assaulted she didn’t speak for 48 hours. When my uncle was murdered, we had to send out a search party to find my father’s voice. Most people have no idea that tragedy and silence often have the exact same address. When your day is a museum of disappointments, hanging from events that were outside of your control, when you feel like your guardian angel put in his two weeks notice two months ago and just decided not to tell you, when it seems like God is just a babysitter that’s always on the phone, when you get punched in the esophagus by a fistful of life. Remember, every year two million people die of dehydration. So it doesn’t matter if the glass is half full or half empty. There’s water in the cup. Drink it and stop complaining. Muscle is created by lifting things that are designed to weigh us down. When your shoulders are heavy stand up straight and call it exercise. Life is a gym membership with a really complicated cancellation policy. Remember, you will survive, things could be worse, and we are never given anything we can’t handle. When the whole world crumbles, you have to build a new one out of all the pieces that are still here. Remember, you are still here. The human heart beats approximately 4,000 times per hour and each pulse, each throb, each palpitation is a trophy, engraved with the words “You are still alive.” You are still alive. So act like it.

This is what happens: somebody—girl usually—got a free spirit, doesn't get on too good with her parents. These kids, they're like tied-down helium balloons. They strain against the string and strain against it, and then something happens, and that string gets cut, and they just float away. And maybe you never see the balloon again . . . Or maybe three or four years from now, or three or four days from now, the prevailing winds take the balloon back home . . . But listen, kid, that string gets cut all the time.

There was a little smile on his mouth—the mouth that had been kissing hers. Otherwise, he was incommunicado. “Liam?” she said again, more loudly this time. Nada. He was out cold. Down for the count. She straightened abruptly. Face was burning, joints buzzing with adrenaline, chest filled with helium. Liam Murphy had kissed her. And he’d fallen asleep in the middle of it. She didn’t know whether to burst into song or kick something.

I know that our hands break things just as frequent as we can fix them. And we often forget that sexism / is a family heirloom that we've been passing down for generations. As men, it is important that we start asking ourselves / What will the boys learn from us?

I take my compliments the same way I take my coffee. I don’t drink coffee.

a weapon will always be a weapon but we choose how we fight the war

We are our ancestors. The spiritual umbilicus is apparent to all. The dead look upon us with the pure love of a mother’s gaze. But the dead love is even more because of our flawed flesh and eternal confusion. The removal from form allows for total and complete unconditional love. We carry our dead with us like helium balloons. There is no breaking the umbilicus.

No he hadn't been the best father, but he was my father, and we loved each other. We needed each other. Though he'd disappointed me countless times through the years, life had already proven too short for me to hold on to that. So I let go of my hurt. I let go years of frustration between us. Most of all, I let go of any desire to change my father and I accepted him for who he was. I took all of my anguish and released it like a fistful of helium balloons to the sky, and I chose to forgive him.

In other words, a star is a nuclear furnace, burning hydrogen fuel and creating nuclear "ash" in the form of waste helium. A star is also a delicate balancing act between the force of gravity, which tends to crush the star into oblivion, and the nuclear force, which tends to blow the star apart with the force of trillions of hydrogen bombs. A star then matures and ages as it exhausts its nuclear fuel.

I later learned that while Elsie was at Crownsville, scientists often conducted research on patients there without consent, including one study titled "Pneumoencephalographic and skull X-ray studies in 100 epileptics." Pneumoencephalography was a technique developed in 1919 for taking images of the brain, which floats in a sea of liquid. That fluid protects the brain from damage, but makes it very difficult to X-ray, since images taken through fluid are cloudy. Pneumoencephalography involved drilling holes into the skulls of research subjects, draining the fluid surrounding their brains, and pumping air or helium into the skull in place of the fluid to allow crisp X-rays of the brain through the skull. the side effects--crippling headaches, dizziness, seizures, vomiting--lasted until the body naturally refilled the skull with spinal fluid, which usually took two to three months. Because pneumoencephalography could cause permanent brain damage and paralysis, it was abandoned in the 1970s. "There is no evidence that the scientists who did research on patients at Crownsville got consent from either the patients of their parents. Bases on the number of patients listed in the pneumoencephalography studyand the years it was conducted, Lurz told me later, it most likely involved every epileptic child in the hospital including Elsie. The same is likely true of at lest on other study called "The Use of Deep Temporal Leads in the Study of Psychomotor Epilepsy," which involved inserting metal probes into patients' brains.

I am nothing but oxygen and hydrogen, A luminous sphere of plasma Held together by helium and gravity, And like a balloon I float on earth, Waiting to be released back into the sky, Waiting to go back in the reverse Direction from which I came, Traveling through a warm tunnel of light, And out into a cold, dark abyss Where I will explode into a thousand pieces. I shall leave behind my body, Just like air abandons the skin of a shattered balloon, And the magnetic dust that carries my Heart and spirit will lift us back To congregate and shine With the stars. Home again, In the fluorescent Kingdom of the constellations, I will once again be called by My soul’s true name. And my heart, It will flicker again, With every memory from its many Lifetimes, And with every wish Made by a child. SONG OF THE STAR by Suzy Kassem

Sophie stood there all perky with her hands on her hips in a model-like stance, and a smile that showed way too many pearly whites…and a helium balloon that shouted It’s A Boy!!! “Nice balloon, Sophie,” he said, slightly amused. “What?” she asked, all innocently. “They were out of Get Well.” The hell they were. This little stunt was so Sophie. I knew exactly what that balloon meant – that I came into this hospital alone but I was gonna leave it with a boy wrapped in my arms. Sophie probably thinks he’s ready to suckle my breasts too.

Lucy woke to the sound of rain. A benediction, gently pattering. For the first time in more than a year, her body relaxed. The release of tension was so sudden that for a moment she felt as if she were filled with helium. Weightless. All her sadness and horror sloughed off her frame like the skin of a snake, too confining and gritted and dry to contain her any longer, and she was rising. She was new and clean and lighter than air, and she sobbed with the release of it. And then she woke fully, and it wasn’t rain caressing the windows of her home but dust, and the weight of her life came crushing down upon her once again.

An artist in this nuthouse century is like a man running an obstacle race fitted out with all the gadgets of our riotous technology. He gets blown a mile into the air on a jet of liquid helium, shuttles about on little rocket tubes, plunges into the deeps of the ocean, shoots out again a hundred miles into the space while lurid sights and sounds shred his senses. Every year, every month, and ‘panoptic’ work appears and warps his consciousness into a new shape. Knowledge itself is in a molten, a plasmatic state and what titanic electromagnetic grip of intellect would be required to lock it solid long enough to reach artistic fusion point? The damned language becomes obsolete as it clatters from the typewriter.

To have without holding Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, love with the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the wind roaring and whimpering in the rooms rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds that thwack like rubber bands in an open palm. It hurts to love wide open stretching the muscles that feel as if they are made of wet plaster, then of blunt knives, then of sharp knives. It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch ; to love and let go again and again. It pesters to remember the lover who is not in the bed, to hold back what is owed to the work that gutters like a candle in a cave without air, to love consciously, conscientiously, concretely, constructively. I can’t do it, you say it’s killing me, but you thrive, you glow on the street like a neon raspberry, You float and sail, a helium balloon bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing on the cold and hot winds of our breath, as we make and unmake in passionate diastole and systole the rhythm of our unbound bonding, to have and not to hold, to love with minimized malice, hunger and anger moment by moment balanced.

Frågar du mig var jag finns så bor jag här bakom bergen Det är långt men jag är nära Jag bor i en annan värld men du bor ju i samma Den finns överallt om också sällsynt som helium Varför begär du ett luftskepp att fara med Begär i stället ett filter för kväve ett filter för kolsyra, väte och andra gaser Begär ett filter för allt som skiljer oss ett filter för livet Du säger att du nästan inte kan andas Än sen! Vem tror du kan andas? Den mesta tiden tar vi det ändå med jämnmod En vis man har sagt : >>Det var så mörkt att jag nätt och jämt kunde se stjärnorna<< Han menade bara att det var natt

You stop, and you turn back into stars. Mum says everyone’s made of stars. Is that true?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, and liked Anna even more than before. ‘All matter is forged by nuclear fusion reactions in the hearts of stars. They take hydrogen atoms, which are the littlest bits of the stuff the world is made of, and they bolt them together into bigger and bigger atoms – helium, oxygen, carbon, everything. All the atoms that make you. You’re star dust.’ She looked pleased with that. ‘And then when my atoms have finished being me, they go off back to the stars?’ ‘Some of them will be rain, some will be earth, some will float away and light up when the solar wind comes, and that makes the aurora. And like you say, some of them will find their way back into a star.

I later learned that while Elsie was at Crownsville, scientists often conducted research on patients there without consent, including one study titled “Pneumoencephalographic and skull X-ray studies in 100 epileptics.” Pneumoencephalography was a technique developed in 1919 for taking images of the brain, which floats in a sea of fluid. That fluid protects the brain from damage, but makes it very difficult to X-ray, since images taken through fluid are cloudy. Pneumoencephalography involved drilling holes into the skulls of research subjects, draining the fluid surrounding their brains, and pumping air or helium into the skull in place of the fluid to allow crisp X-rays of the brain through the skull. The side effects—crippling headaches, dizziness, seizures, vomiting—lasted until the body naturally refilled the skull with spinal fluid, which usually took two to three months. Because pneumoencephalography could cause permanent brain damage and paralysis, it was abandoned in the 1970s. There

I am nothing but oxygen and hydrogen, a luminous sphere of plasma held together by helium and gravity, And like a balloon I float on earth, waiting to be released back into the sky, where I will explode into a thousand pieces. I shall leave behind my body, just like air abandons the skin of a shattered balloon, and the magnetic dust that carries my heart and spirit will lift us back to congregate and shine with the stars. Home again, in the fluorescent kingdom of the constellations, I will once again be called by my soul’s true name.

Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks (explaining our penchant for baseball). A cavewoman thinking too hard about what matter is ultimately made of might fail to notice the tiger sneaking up behind and get cleaned right out of the gene pool. Darwin’s theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down. We’ve repeatedly tested this prediction, and the results overwhelmingly support Darwin. At high speeds, Einstein realized that time slows down, and curmudgeons on the Swedish Nobel committee found this so weird that they refused to give him the Nobel Prize for his relativity theory. At low temperatures, liquid helium can flow upward. At high temperatures, colliding particles change identity; to me, an electron colliding with a positron and turning into a Z-boson feels about as intuitive as two colliding cars turning into a cruise ship. On microscopic scales, particles schizophrenically appear in two places at once, leading to the quantum conundrums mentioned above. On astronomically large scales… weirdness strikes again: if you intuitively understand all aspects of black holes [then you] should immediately put down this book and publish your findings before someone scoops you on the Nobel Prize for quantum gravity… [also,] the leading theory for what happened [in the early universe] suggests that space isn’t merely really really big, but actually infinite, containing infinitely many exact copies of you, and even more near-copies living out every possible variant of your life in two different types of parallel universes.