"I barely knew them -- they were aliens, after all, visitors from a familiar-sounding elsewhere, slipping into our awareness by an unimaginable route -- and yet I'm profoundly stirred by their loss. I'm trying to work out why that is. In the end I decide it's because although I, we, didn't really know them, they knew us, and whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end."
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Source: Chapter 16, "Vina Divina"
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Ground_Beneath_Her_Feet
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The Ground Beneath Her Feet
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