"The preserve of ambition and folly in pursuit of illusion or delusion"
About this Quote
Ambition gets romanticized as a clean engine of progress; Jarman drags it back into the messy realm where wanting and self-deception share a bed. “The preserve of ambition and folly” reads like a warning label: this isn’t a neutral landscape, it’s a fenced-in domain where the usual rules of sanity don’t apply. “Preserve” is doing quiet work here. It can mean a protected habitat, suggesting that illusion is not an accident but a curated environment - maintained by institutions, by taste-makers, by artists themselves. It also carries the entitled whiff of “one’s preserve,” the private territory of ego.
The sting is in the pairing: ambition is not merely accompanied by folly; it depends on it. Jarman, a director who made beauty out of fracture and refusal, understood how much art runs on deliberate misreadings of reality: the fantasy that a film can fix history, that style can outshout power, that an image can outlast a body. The line “illusion, or delusion” tightens the screw. Illusion is craft, cinema’s native tongue; delusion is pathology, a belief you can’t admit is constructed. Jarman blurs them because artists live on that border, and so do publics. Politics sells itself as inevitability; culture sells itself as liberation; both require you to keep buying the dream.
In the late-20th-century Britain Jarman battled - Thatcherism, censorship, the AIDS crisis - illusion wasn’t a garnish, it was a battleground. His intent feels less like moral scolding than a grim inventory: to pursue a vision is to risk becoming its most loyal dupe.
The sting is in the pairing: ambition is not merely accompanied by folly; it depends on it. Jarman, a director who made beauty out of fracture and refusal, understood how much art runs on deliberate misreadings of reality: the fantasy that a film can fix history, that style can outshout power, that an image can outlast a body. The line “illusion, or delusion” tightens the screw. Illusion is craft, cinema’s native tongue; delusion is pathology, a belief you can’t admit is constructed. Jarman blurs them because artists live on that border, and so do publics. Politics sells itself as inevitability; culture sells itself as liberation; both require you to keep buying the dream.
In the late-20th-century Britain Jarman battled - Thatcherism, censorship, the AIDS crisis - illusion wasn’t a garnish, it was a battleground. His intent feels less like moral scolding than a grim inventory: to pursue a vision is to risk becoming its most loyal dupe.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | Evidence:
The preserve of ambition and folly in pursuit of illusion, or... delusion. (Journal entry for 22 Feb. 1989; exact page not verified from a primary scan). The strongest evidence points to Derek Jarman's own journal entry dated 22 February 1989, later published in Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman. A quotations reference explicitly attributes the line to that dated entry, referring to the film industry, and a quotation dictionary independently gives the same attribution. The earliest book publication I could verify is the 1991 Century edition of Modern Nature. I could not directly inspect a page image of the 1991 edition to confirm the exact page number, so the date of the journal entry is more secure than the page. |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Jarman, Derek. (2026, March 8). The preserve of ambition and folly in pursuit of illusion or delusion. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-preserve-of-ambition-and-folly-in-pursuit-of-158122/
Chicago Style
Jarman, Derek. "The preserve of ambition and folly in pursuit of illusion or delusion." FixQuotes. March 8, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-preserve-of-ambition-and-folly-in-pursuit-of-158122/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The preserve of ambition and folly in pursuit of illusion or delusion." FixQuotes, 8 Mar. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-preserve-of-ambition-and-folly-in-pursuit-of-158122/. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.
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