Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.

The remark frames maturity not as a simple shedding of fantasy for truth, but as an exchange: one set of sustaining beliefs gives way to another. “Illusions” here can mean the consoling narratives we use to make life coherent—about love, selfhood, society, or purpose. Growing up, on this view, involves disillusionment, but also the creation of new imaginative frameworks that let us continue living and acting. The line resonates with Woolf’s broader interest in how consciousness constructs reality and how art and memory shape experience: even when naïveté falls away, human beings still need interpretive stories to endure, to hope, and to make meaning.