An excerpt

Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson. Page 195.

Sylvie did not want to lose me.  She did not want me to grow gigantic and multiply, so that I seemed to fill the whole house, and she did not wish me to turn subtle and miscible, so that I could pass through the membranes that separate dream and dream.  She did not wish to remember me.  She much preferred my simple, ordinary presence, silent and ungainly though I might be.  For she could regard me without strong emotion—a familiar shape, a familiar face, a familiar silence. She could forget I was in the room. She could speak to herself, or to someone in her thoughts, with pleasure and animation, even while I sat beside her—this was the measure of our intimacy, that she gave almost no thought to me at all.

But if she lost me, I would become extraordinary by my vanishing.