Enhance Your Quote Experience
Enjoy ad-free browsing, unlimited collections, and advanced search features with Premium.
“ ”It may even be that, as you look more closely, to recognize the hidden seed which, born of a secret union, grows into a luxuriant plant and spreads forth into a thousand tendrils, until a single blossom, swelling to maturity, absorbs all the life-sap and kills the seed itself. [...] I came to feel that what we call simply dream and imagination might represent the secret thread that runs through our lives and links its varied facets; and that the man who thinks that, because he has perceived this, he has acquired the power to break the thread and challenge that mysterious force which rules us, is to be given up as lost.
About E.T.A. Hoffmann
Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (24 January 1776 – 25 June 1822), better known by his pen name E. T. A. Hoffmann, was a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror, a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist. He is the subject and hero of Jacques Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann, a fictionalized account.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Additional quotes by E.T.A. Hoffmann
Yet although I could not resist doing so, my sleep was not interrupted. The door opened and a dark figure entered whom I recognized to my horror as my own self in Capuchin robes, with beard and tonsure. The figure came nearer and nearer my bed: I lay motionless, and every sound I tried to utter was stifled in the trance that gripped me. The figure sat down on my bed and leered mockingly at me.
“You must come with me,” it said. “Let us climb on to the roof beneath the weathercock, which is playing a merry tune for the owl's wedding. Up there we will fight with each other, and the one who pushes the other over will become king and be able to drink blood.”
I felt the figure take hold of me and lift me up. With a strength born of desperation I screamed:
“You are not me, you are the Devil!” - and clawed at the face of the menacing spectre. But my fingers went through his eyes as if they were empty cavities, and the figure burst into strident laughter.
It is only in the morning that one should marry, read unfavourable reviews, make one's will, beat one's servants, and so forth.
"However, their father said, "I handed the Nutcracker over to Marie's particular care, and since I see that he needs it just now, she can do as she likes with him, and no one else is to interfere. What's more, I am really surprised that Fritz would expect a soldier wounded in battle to go straight back on active service. As a good military man, he ought to know that you don't draw the wounded up on parade!