What are some quotes from Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffman?

Hoffmann is known chiefly as a writer of Gothic fiction, but much of his work involves music. He was a composer as well as a writer, and in his writings he expresses a philosophical interpretation of music, especially that of his idol, Mozart. In the novella "Don Juan," the narrator is overjoyed to find that a performance of Mozart's opera (Don Giovanni in Italian) is being given in the theater that adjoins the hotel where he's staying. When the singing begins, he reacts with joy that the performance is being given in the original Italian in which Mozart wrote the opera. He first quotes the opening words sung by the character Leporello, Don Juan's servant:

"Notte e giorno faticar". So they're singing in Italian? Here in this German town Italian? Ah, che piacere! I will hear all the recitatives, will hear everything, as the great master felt and conceived it in his mind!

Hoffmann is showing not only his huge admiration for Mozart, but an internationalist temperament revealing his own independence—his preference for hearing the opera in Italian rather than German—during a time, in the early nineteenth century, when a new nationalist sentiment was sweeping the German states and all of Europe. What is just as important in this story, however, is his belief that Mozart's music creates its own world as a kind of alternative reality, and one in which the characters of the opera are expressive of the liberation of humanity from the old beliefs and constraints.
He views Don Juan as a Romantic hero or even as a kind of superhero, not as the contemptible seducer of legend and of earlier treatments of the story. And the character of Donna Anna, whom Don Juan has attempted to seduce and who presumably hates him, is the female counterpart, in Hoffmann's view, of his exalted status. As is typical of Hoffmann, the narrative becomes a dreamlike projection of the narrator's inner feelings, in which he imagines himself conversing with the characters of the opera. He describes his interpretation of Anna's character and her inability to resist Don Juan:

The fire of a superhuman mentality, a glow out of hell, flowed through her and made any kind of resistance to him futile.

By our standards it is, possibly, a male chauvinist slant to the story, but also one in which Hoffmann sees both Don Juan and Donna Anna as exalted rebels who are defying the norms of society and tradition. This form of rebellion, of independence from ordinary human thought, occurs throughout Hoffmann's fiction, coupled with the Gothic element in which man is paradoxically punished for his independence, his wish to be different. In "The Sandman," the scientist Coppelius can be seen as representing both progress and evil: he is a bogeyman haunting the protagonist Nathanael from childhood on and plaguing him with a fear that eventually destroys Nathanael. His childhood memories of Coppelius describe the man in monstrous terms:

His whole figure was hideous and repulsive, but most disgusting to us children were his coarse brown hairy fists. Indeed we did not like to eat anything he had touched with them. This he had noticed, and it was his delight, under some pretext or other, to touch a piece of cake or some nice fruit, that our kind mother might have quietly put on our plates, just for the pleasure of seeing us turn away with tears in our eyes, in disgust and abhorrence . . . .

And yet Nathanael falls in love with Olimpia, an automaton, a robot-girl created by Coppelius. In Hoffmann's fiction, there is a simultaneous attraction-repulsion to a dreamlike meta-reality that the reader always has reason to suspect is the tortured creation of the minds of characters hovering on the edge of psychosis. Nathanael's deepest fear is that Coppelius will attempt to remove his eyes to be used in his grotesque experiments:

Then he dragged me up and flung me on the hearth, where the fire began to singe my hair. "Now we have eyes enough—a pretty pair of child's eyes," he whispered, and, taking some red-hot grains out of the flames with his bare hands, he was about to sprinkle them in my eyes . . . .

Fortunately, Nathanael's father stops Coppelius from extracting the child's eyes. But the focus upon eyes is significant. Eyes, of course, are our means of perceiving the outside world, but it's precisely that perception which is constantly called into doubt in Hoffmann's fiction. In the story "Ritter Gluck," the narrator meets the ghost of the composer Gluck, but it remains an open question as to whether the man really is Gluck, is an impostor, or is just a figment of the narrator's imagination. All of this is typical of the Romantic movement, though in Hoffmann there is often a particularly grotesque, even ugly slant in his presentation of both the supernatural and the workaday world from which his characters seek refuge in their fantasies.