As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one's own room.
-- Virginia Woolf

Importance: This quotation is significant because it establishes the premise around which the entire essay will revolve: the relationship between the self and the collective. Here, Woolf sets up her walk through London as an opportunity to dispose of the self in favor of becoming an anonymous part of collective society.

The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.
-- Virginia Woolf

Importance: Here, Woolf delineates the difference between the eye and the mind. The eye sees and observes but does not contemplate or observe...