What should I do if I get an exam question which I don't have any quotes for?

Firstly, it is important to try to reduce the risk of this happening beforehand by learning as many quotations as possible. A good way to look at it is that no quote you learn will be unhelpful, and every quote you learn might be the key to unlocking a question. With a variety of quotes under your belt, the risk of being caught out on the day is lessened. Just trying to memorise one or two a day is easy at the time but will greatly help when exams come around.Take the following question, which is taken from a genuine A Level English paper a few years ago: "However difficult the process of learning may be, most works of literature move towards inevitably self-discovery." This question is daunting and seems very niche, and very few people will have learnt specifically about the process of self-discovery. Here, you have to sit back and try and break down the different parts of the question. Often isolating key words helps. From the above you could take "difficult[y]", "learning", "movement", "inevitab[ility]" and "self-discovery". You now have 5 ways into the question. You might not think you have any appropriate quotes, but looking at it this way you might realise you do have material about "movement". The following quote is from Great Expectations: "We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me." Here Pip is seemingly talking only about his journey from his house to London. But the idea of "changing" horses and "mists" rising seem to symbolise something else. Think about how Dickens uses the physical journey into a bigger world to represent Pip's trepidation. The quote is about literal "movement", but can be linked back to "difficulty", "inevitability" and eventually "self-discovery". In this way, when confronted with a difficult question, break it down, and think about how the quotations you have learnt might link back to it.