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GAMSAT Section 2 quote prompts: Memory

2 GAMSAT-style prompts on memory. 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 memory.

  • Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.

    Oscar Wilde

  • We do not remember days, we remember moments.

    Cesare Pavese

  • The palest ink is better than the best memory.

    Proverb

  • Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.

    Anonymous

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 memory.

  • Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.

    Oscar Wilde

  • Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.

    L. M. Montgomery

  • We do not remember days, we remember moments, and even those we quietly rewrite each time we visit them.

  • Forgetting is not always a loss, sometimes it is the only mercy the mind can offer.

  • The past we carry is less a record of what happened than a story we keep editing to bear it.

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 exploring is that memory is not a faithful archive but a living act of storytelling, which is precisely what makes it both consoling and unreliable. Open by acknowledging its tenderness, the way a remembered moment keeps a lost person or place alive. Then complicate it: each recollection is reconstructed and subtly altered, so the past we treasure may owe as much to the present as to fact. A second move might find the mercy in forgetting, the way the mind softens or sheds what it cannot afford to keep. Caution: avoid the sentimental conclusion that we should cling to every memory, since some are kept only to keep a wound open.

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More themes to practise

AcceptanceAgeingAmbitionAngerArtArtificial intelligenceAuthorityAutomationBeautyBelonging
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