"I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life."
In these essays, Woolf is eager to set herself apart as an individual. She uses writing as a format to escape the ordinary and to paint her own experiences in light of the unpredictable. More significantly, she opens up about herself personally in these essays, becoming vulnerable with her audience.
"But I was thinking; feeling; living; those two lives that the two halves symbolized with the intensity, the muffled intensity, which a butterfly or moth feels when with its sticky tremulous legs and antennae it pushes out of the chrysalis and emerges and sits quivering beside the broken case for a moment; its wings still creased; its eyes dazzled, incapable of flight.”
Woolf often expresses feeling her psyche in two disparate halves. One part of her feels capable and confident, grounded in love and logic, but the other half is vulnerable and scared, like a recently emerged butterfly or moth after its transformation. She compares this feeling to a particular moment after leaving home and realizing just how broad the world is.
"These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important."
This essay collection largely focuses upon Woolf's early years. She is curious in presenting or interpreting who she was in her younger years. Although her memories are perceived as reliable, Woolf herself admits that her understanding of her childhood is no less trustworthy than those instances which didn't stick in her memory. A lifetime is composed of many moments, all of which are important but not necessarily memorable. In a sense Woolf laments not possessing some more concrete vision of her own young life.
"The tragedy of her death was not that it made one, now and then very intensely, unhappy. It was that it made her unreal; and us solemn, and self-conscious. We were made to act parts that we did not feel; to fumble for words that we did not know. It obscured, it dulled."
In grieving for her mother, Woolf recalls how she felt pressured to respond emotionally when she didn't feel those emotions. Naturally she was devastated, but the suddenness of her mom's death prevented her from processing those feelings. She and her family were left numb, unable to fulfill the functions of grief which, it seemed, people looked to them to do.
