Derek Jarman > Quotes

“Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking.”
― Derek Jarman

“Oh how Shakespeare would have loved cinema!”
― Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge

“But the wind does not stop for my thoughts. It whips across the flooded gravel pits drumming up waves on their waters that glint hard and metallic in the night, over the shingle, rustling the dead gorse and skeletal bugloss, running in rivulets through the parched grass - while I sit here in the dark holding a candle that throws my divided shadow across the room and gathers my thoughts to the flame like moths.
I have not moved for many hours. Years, a lifetime, eddy past: one, two, three: into the early hours, the clock chimes. The wind is singing now”
― Derek Jarman, Modern Nature

“Always becoming, never arriving. Life is at a standstill - only ideas flash past. In such confusion I find myself running after them: Hey! Stop! Stop! But they escape, leaving me staring at a grey English spring.”
― Derek Jarman, Modern Nature

“You say to the boy open your eyes
When he opens his eyes and sees the light
You make him cry out. Saying
O Blue come forth
O Blue arise
O Blue ascend
O Blue come in”
― Derek Jarman

“If you can, trap me. I'll make a good patient because I was brought up in the environment of authority; it's going to be hard to pull me in though- I've been running all my life, playing truant. If you can capture me I'll buckle down. I'll loathe you in secret and put on a good face.”
― Derek Jarman

“a dream world, a world of magic and ritual, yet there are images there of the burning cars and radar systems, which remind you there is a price to be paid in order to gain this dream in the face of a world of violence.”
― Derek Jarman

“I think of the area of magic as a metaphor for the homosexual situation. You know, magic which is banned and dangerous, difficult and mysterious. I can see that use of magic in the Cocteau films, in Kenneth Anger and very much in Eisenstein. Maybe it is an uncomfortable, banned area which is disruptive, and maybe it is a metaphor for the gay situation.”
― derek jarman

“But now I have re-discovered boredom, where I can fight ‘what next’ with nothing.”
― Derek Jarman, Modern Nature

“The Gautama Buddha instructs me to walk away from illness. But he wasn't attached to a drip.”
― Derek Jarman

“How to survive as a reasonably intact human being undamaged by popular preconceptions and misconceptions? It has been a long uphill battle.”
― Derek Jarman, At Your Own Risk

“As I sweat it out in the early hours, a 'guilty victim' of the scourge, I want to bear witness to how happy I am, and will be till the day I die, that I was part of the hated sexual revolution; and that I don't regret a single step or encounter I made in that time; and if I write in future with regret, it will be a reflection of a temporary indisposition.”
― Derek Jarman

“I am wandering aimlessly in this labyrinth of memories.”
― Derek Jarman, Modern Nature

“Lawns, it seems to me, are against nature, barren and often threadbare - the enemy of a good garden. For the same trouble as mowing, you could have a year's vegetables: runner beans, cauliflowers and cabbages, mixed with pinks and peonies, shirley poppies and delphiniums; wouldn't that beautify the land and save us from the garden terrorism that prevails?”
― Derek Jarman, Derek Jarman's Garden

“God is a black Jewish lesbian.”
― Derek Jarman

“I always thought of foxglove as a flower of the woods — deep in the shade, beloved of the bumble bee and little people. But the foxgloves of the Ness are a quite different breed. Strident purple in the yellow broom, they stand exposed to wind and blistering sunshine, as rigid as guardsmen on parade.
There they are at the edge of the lakeside, standing to attention, making a splash — no blushing violets these, and not in ones or twos but hundreds, proud regiments marching in the summer, with clash of cymbals and rolling drums. Here comes June. Glorious, colourful June.
~
The foxglove, Digitalis purpurea, folksglove, or fairyglove — whose speckles and freckles are the marks of elves' fingers, is also called dead man's fingers. It contains the poison Digitalis, first used by a Dr. Withering in the 18th century to cure heart disease. Foxglove is hardly mentioned in older herbals — Gerard says, it has no use in medicine, being hot and dry and bitter. The 'glove' comes from the Anglo-Saxon for a string of bells, 'gleow'.”
― Derek Jarman, Modern Nature

“How did my friends cross the cobalt river, with what did they pay the ferryman? As they set out for the indigo shore under this jet-black sky - some died on their feet with a backward glance.”
― Derek Jarman, Pharmacopoeia: A Dungeness Notebook