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GAMSAT Section 2 quote prompts: Regret

2 GAMSAT-style prompts on regret. 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 regret.

  • Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are it might have been.

    Kurt Vonnegut

  • I would rather regret the things I have done than the things I have not.

    Lucille Ball

  • Never regret. If it is good, it is wonderful. If it is bad, it is experience.

    Anonymous

  • We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.

    Jim Rohn

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 regret.

  • Of all the words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: it might have been.

    John Greenleaf Whittier

  • I would rather regret the things I have done than the things I have not done.

    Lucille Ball

  • Regret is the tax we pay on having cared enough to choose at all.

  • We do not regret the road not taken, we regret the imagined road, which had no potholes because we never drove it.

  • A life with no regrets is not a brave life, it is an unexamined one.

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 regret, far from being a wound to be avoided, is the evidence that we cared enough to choose and honest enough to look back. Open by acknowledging its pain, the haunting weight of the words it might have been. Then complicate the popular advice to live without regret: much of what we mourn is an imagined alternative we have airbrushed of its own likely sorrows. A second move might distinguish regret that paralyses, looping over a past we cannot change, from regret that instructs the choices still ahead of us. Caution: avoid the bumper-sticker creed of no regrets, since a life that refuses to second-guess itself has usually just stopped paying attention.

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More themes to practise

AcceptanceAgeingAmbitionAngerArtArtificial intelligenceAuthorityAutomationBeautyBelonging
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