In my experience—and this is a very awkward way to put it, since I don’t really know what the word experience means—the strangest people in one’s life are the people one has known and loved, still know and will always love. Here, both I and the vocabulary are in trouble, for strangest does not imply stranger. A stranger is a stranger is a stranger, simply, and you watch the stranger to anticipate his next move. But the people who elicit from you a depth of attention and wonder which we helplessly call love are perpetually making moves which cannot possibly be anticipated. Eventually, you realise that it never occurred to you to anticipate their next move, not only because you couldn’t but because you didn’t have to: it was not a question of moving on to the next move, but simply, of being present. Danger, true, you try to anticipate and you prepare yourself, without knowing it, to stand in the way of death. For the strangest people in the world are those people recognised, beneath one’s senses, by one’s soul—the people utterly indispensable for one’s journey. 

James Baldwin
“Just Above My Head”
pp. 376 - 377 

“The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters. He encounters, because he must encounter, those people who see his secrecy before they see anything else, and who drag these secrets out of him; sometimes with the intention of using them against him, sometimes with more benevolent intent; but, whatever the intent, the moment is awful and the accumulating revelation is an unspeakable anguish.”

- James Baldwin
Another Country p. 199