Jerome Bixby

“ I'll call them the slizzers, because they sliz people. Lord only knows how long they've been on Earth, and how many of them there are....
They're all around us, living with us. We are hardly ever aware of their existence, because they can make themselves look like us, and do most of the time; and if they can look like us, there's really no need for them to think like us, is there? People think and behave in so many cockeyed ways, anyhow. Whenever a slizzer fumbles a little in his impersonation of a human being, and comes up with a puzzling response, I suppose we just shrug and think. ”

“ He sat down across the table, his eyes—now suddenly enormous and black—eagerly on me. "I hate like hell waiting until you deal him a big pot—"
"No," Joe said sharply. "Too much at one time, and he'd wonder what hit him. We'll do it just like always ... one of us at a time, and only a little at a time. Get him when he rakes in the loot. They never miss it when they feel like that." ”

“ They aren't killers, or rampaging monsters; quite the contrary. They need us, something like the way we'd need maple trees if it came to the point where maple syrup was our only food. That's why we're in no comic-book danger of being destroyed, any more than maple trees would be, in the circumstances I just mentioned—or are, as things go. In a sense, we're rather well-treated and helped along a bit ... the way we care for maple trees.
But, sometimes a man here and there will be careless, or ignorant, or greedy ... ”