Education Quote by Audre Lorde

“Keep it all afloat” is a survival image, not a self-help slogan. Audre Lorde isn’t selling inner peace; she’s describing the mechanics of staying alive in a world that prefers you simplified, sortable, and quiet. The line treats contradiction as ballast: you don’t resolve it, you distribute your weight so you don’t capsize.

Lorde’s intent lands in the gap between tidy identity politics and messy lived experience. As a Black lesbian feminist poet navigating racism in feminist spaces and sexism in Black political spaces, she knew “coherence” was often a demand made by others: pick one struggle, one label, one acceptable tone. “Learning to live in harmony” doesn’t mean flattening conflict; it means refusing the psychic tax of pretending you’re not made of competing needs, loyalties, angers, and tenderness. Harmony here is closer to orchestration than agreement.

The subtext is pointedly political. Contradictions aren’t personal glitches; they’re produced by systems that force impossible choices. Lorde’s broader work argues that difference can be generative rather than divisive, but only if you stop treating it as error. She also rejects the fantasy that liberation arrives once you’ve fixed yourself into a single, unassailable story. Floating is ongoing labor, especially for people taught to see themselves as a problem to be solved.

Poetically, the sentence works because it’s both intimate and structural: “your contradictions” names the private interior; “afloat” admits external pressure. It offers no catharsis, just a craft lesson: don’t sink chasing purity.