We awoke at first light, and saw the eagle still standing in the same place, stock-still. And then—I’ll never forget this—Ulay walked over to the bird and touched it, and it fell over, dead. It had been entirely eaten by ants. Every inch of my body turned to goose bumps. We packed our things and got out of there, fast.

Anything on her body she could kiss, she kissed. I stared at her in amazement. This was better than psychotherapy. This was better than anything. This was the most beautiful fucking human being I’d ever seen in my life. And in that instant, all my misery drained away.

I told them about everything that had happened—the affair, my confession, Ulay’s amazing reaction. They looked at each other. Then they told me: three days after I’d left for San Francisco, Ulay had taken up with a girl from Surinam, and he’d lived with her in our home literally until the morning I returned.

the participants became performers, and the rest of the public could watch them with binoculars, able to take precise note of the tiniest details about them: their slightest movements, their facial expressions, the texture of their skin over a two-hour period. The public was both participating in and witnessing a performance that we were creating

it felt like a kind of Black Mass or bacchanal. It seemed so negative to me. But at bottom it was just not my story. Not conceptually or in any other way.

I felt I could never have children with Ulay because he always abandoned them. But somehow, at the same time, I believed our working relationship would last forever.

Performance is all about state of mind. So in order to get to the right state of mind, you have to be mentally and physically prepared.

“You know, there’s a Chinese saying: ‘Weak birds fly first.’

Sometimes what the dead leave behind tells us things our dear ones would never have revealed to us while they were alive.