If there is a malignant power that treacherously introduces a thread into our hearts, by means of which it then drags us along a dangerous, a ruinous path which we should never have trodden of our own accord, then it must become part of us, part of our own self; for only thus shall we believe it and give it the freedom of action it needs in order to carry out its secret purpose. But if our minds are firm enough and sufficiently strengthened by a happy life always to recognize alien, hostile influences and to proceed with calm steps along the path chosen by our own inclinations, the sinister power perishes in the vain attempt to create the shape that is to serve as a reflection of ourselves.

Olympia’s figure floated before him in the air, emerged from the undergrowth, and stared at him with big shining eyes out of the sparkling stream.

Caught in this maze of crime, torn by love and repugnance, by bliss and horror, I was like the damned soul whom a lovely angel, gently smiling, beckons up aloft, while Satan holds him fast with red-hot claws, and the holy angel’s loving smile, in which all the happiness of high heaven is mirrored, becomes the most agonizing of his torments.

Eugenius, whom no one noticed, no one bothered about, didn’t know what was happening to him. A wave of icy cold and then of burning heat swept through his limbs, an ineffable pain cut into his chest, and yet it seemed to him that he had never felt such a wonderful sensation. Suppose the bride now approached you, suppose you, too, pressed her to your breast? This thought, which suddenly struck him like an electric shock, appeared to him a monstrous sacrilege; yet the nameless fear that seemed to be crushing him was itself the most fervid longing, the hungriest yearning, for that which would dissolve his whole ego in annihilating pleasure-pain.

Suffice it to say that the Countess – the embodiment of love and pleasure, a woman who carried in the core of her being the art of that higher coquetry which consists in affording only a foretaste of enjoyment and so arousing and maintaining the insatiable thirst of passionate longing – systematically reduced the young man to a state of even more vehement, even more consuming desire.

— E.T.A. Hoffman