People are strangers to me. People I don’t know have habits that are nothing like my habits. These habits surprise me and yet they don’t surprise other people: they are taken completely for granted. Someone belongs to the Hunt Club. Someone else is fond of Dubonnet before dinner and always knows when it is time for a drink. These people are not like me and they are not really like each other, although they seem to me more like each other than like me just because they have in common the fact that they are all strangers to me.
[Lydia Davis, Our Strangers,
da Our Strangers, Canongate 2024, p. 108]