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GAMSAT Section 2 quote prompts: Belonging

2 GAMSAT-style prompts on belonging. Each gives you five comments that disagree, so your job is to find the tension and argue a clear position. Give yourself about 30 minutes per essay.

Task B · ReflectivePrompt 1 of 2

Consider the following comments on belonging.

  • Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.

    Madeleine L'Engle

  • We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.

    Albert Schweitzer

  • The longing to belong is one of the great hungers of the human heart.

    Anonymous

  • I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light.

    Helen Keller

Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.

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Task B · ReflectivePrompt 2 of 2

Consider the following comments on belonging.

  • We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been, a place half-remembered and half-envisioned.

    Starhawk

  • The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.

    Carl Jung

  • To belong everywhere is, in a quiet way, to belong nowhere at all.

  • We will surrender almost any part of ourselves for the warmth of being let in.

  • Real belonging begins the moment we stop editing ourselves to be accepted.

Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.

A way into this prompt

A reflective thesis worth pursuing is that belonging is in tension with selfhood, because the welcome we crave so often asks us to trim the very self that longs to be welcomed. Open by honouring the depth of the need, the way the wish to be let in can feel like a wish to come home. Then turn to its cost, the small daily edits we make to fit, until acceptance is granted to a version of us that is not quite us. A second move might distinguish belonging that requires concealment from belonging that survives being fully known. Caution: avoid the glib resolution that we should simply be ourselves and the right people will appear, since that advice underrates how much courage and how much loneliness the waiting can demand.

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More themes to practise

AcceptanceAgeingAmbitionAngerArtArtificial intelligenceAuthorityAutomationBeautyBoredom
See all prompt themes