“I am a stranger in a strange town, and the man standing beside me has just removed his pants. There are mitigating factors—he is well-kempt, we are in a laundromat, and as a registered nurse, I have seen this sort of thing before—but they fail to completely dissipate the tension inherent in sharing close quarters with a pantless stranger.”
“Strangely, I heard a stranger say, I am with you.”
“I am a stranger, learning to love the strangers around me”
“I still don't understand," Eddie whispered. "What good came from your death?" "You lived," the Blue Man answered. "But we barely knew each other. I might as well have been a stranger."..."Strangers," the Blue Man said, "are just family you have yet to come to know.”
“My world has changed so much. Everything around me has perceptibly shifted in a direction I hadn’t seen coming. The people around me, the ones I once thought I knew so well have transformed into strangers. Worst of all, I can’t recognize the person I have become.”
“Once my imagination persuaded me that the dying man gave me a reproachful look out of his shadowy eyes, and it seemed to me that I could rather he had stabbed me than done that. He muttered and mumbled like a dreamer in his sleep, about his wife and his child; and I thought about a new despair, "This thing that I have done does not end with him; it falls upon them too and they never did me any harm... The man was not in uniform, and was not armed. He was a stranger in the country; that was all we ever found out about him. The thought of him got to preying upon me every night; I could not get rid of it. I could not drive it away, the taking of that unoffending life seemed such a wanton thing. And it seemed an epitome of war; that all war must be just that -- the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it. My campaign was spoiled. It seemed to me I was not rightly equipped for this awful business; that war was intended for men, and I for a child's nurse.”