14 Quotes by Diriye Osman

Freedom is not a project. It is a lifelong trust exercise with the God in you: it is about honouring your humanity in all its gore and glory. Freedom is a hymn and a holler. Freedom is simply believing that your life matters.

As her body expanded so did her interior landscape. She imagined minarets, skyscrapers, entire cities being constructed inside her. Thighs thickened, belly became basketball-sized, buttocks deepened with dimples. Even her taste-buds shifted, and she held her tongue out for crushed ice, chalk, charcoal.

The only seed that needs regular watering is our imagination.

In those sticky summer nights in South London our windows stay open and our tiny apartment becomes our secret garden. The magic of the secret garden is that it exists in our imagination. There are no limits, no borderlines. The secret garden leads to the marigolds of Mogadishu and the magnolias of Kingston and when the heat turns us sticky and sweet and unwilling to be claimed by defeat we own the night. We own our bodies. We own our lives.

When were you first told that you have no value, and when did that torment calcify into the deepest truths you hold about yourself? When did you first break? How did you piece yourself back together? What was the point when you realized that you had to dig out all your roots, and tend to the soil of you, which is to say, the softest, sweetest part of your essence?

Home is in my hair, my lips, my arms, my thighs, my feet and my hands. I am my own home. And when I wake up crying in the morning, thinking of how lonely I am, I pinch my skin, tug at my hair, remind myself that I am alive. Remind myself to step outside and greet the morning. Remind myself that it’s all about forward motion. It’s all about change. It’s all about that elusive state. Freedom.

There was once a house built out of memories and inside this house lived a woman called The Memory Snatcher. This woman was my Aunt Beydan. She was a sorceress and as a child I feared she would stalk me in my sleep and steal all my memories until I could no longer remember who I was.

I'm delving into my spirit and unearthing diamonds glazed with grit. I have stopped trying to make these stones glint. Sixir and soulwork are more specific terms for such self-mining. Sixir and soulwork are a kiss from God, and as such, won't submit to decompression. A kiss from God is a dirt-coated diamond buried bowel-deep within the human animal. A kiss from God is how we live and die in this spirit-trapped multiverse

Every experience lately felt like an experiment of the body, of its power and limitations. Such experiments created a desire for something more fulfilling. It was a hunger born of rootlessness but he couldn't see that. He couldn't see that true liberation was a strictly DIY process.