How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph), with the exception of Part V, which runs (Part#. "Short Title". Paragraph). Part V has no numbered chapters—only title headings.
Quote #1
More time had passed than he had realized. Mama had relinquished the marshal's baton of her motherhood and gone into a different world. (II.2.7)
Karel and his wife, Marketa, have spent most of their married lives avoiding Karel's mother because she is demanding and obnoxious—a stereotypical in-law. But now that Mama is getting up there in years, Karel realizes that she really doesn't want to be all up in his business. She just doesn't care anymore. Jan would say that she has drifted over the border in relation to Karel.
Quote #2
Mama felt abandoned among her recollections, betrayed by the sudden lack of interest and by the failure of her memory. (II.4.11)
The problem with aging (well, one of them) is that memory often fails us—and so do the loved ones in our lives. Mama finds that her son Karel, his wife, Marketa, and their "cousin" Eva really have no interest in waiting around while she untangles her mixed-up memories. And that's a terribly lonely experience for her.
Quote #3
...she thought it was as if he really were a four-year-old, as if he were fleeing to his childhood, leaving the two women alone except for his extraordinarily efficient body, so mechanically robust that it seemed impersonal and empty, and imaginable with anyone else's soul. (II.12.4)
Marketa reacts to Karel's bizarre behavior during their threesome with Eva. What Marketa can't know is that Karel is reliving the moment of his first sexual arousal (he was 4), when he saw his mother's friend, Mrs. Nora, naked in a locker room. The episode is deeply isolating for Marketa, who feels that she's having sex with a robot. But this situation also places Karel in a world of his own, lost in the memory of that proto-sexual encounter—and he's really, really enjoying himself.
Quote #4
The only amusing thing about it all was my existence, the existence of a man erased from history, from literary histories, and from the telephone book, of a dead man now returned to life in an amazing reincarnation to preach the great truth of astrology to hundreds of thousands of young people in a socialist country. (III.3.5)
Kundera recalls his life after expulsion from the Communist Party—and from his life as a revered writer and professor. He can't even find work to support himself until a loyal friend offers him the chance to write a horoscope column (anonymously, of course). But Kundera has lost his identity and any sense of professional camaraderie, writing on the sly as he is. He doesn't even have anyone with whom he can share the irony of writing an astrology column for a country full of supposed unbelievers.
Quote #5
Madame Raphael, the teacher, clipped that photo from the magazine and gazed at it dreamily. She too wished to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a circle of men and women with whom she could hold hands in a ring dance, at first in the Methodist Church...then in the Communist Party, then in the Trotskyist Party, then in a Trotskyist splinter party... (III.5.5)
As the immortal Bob Geldof once said, "Everybody's got a hole to fill." And for Madame Raphael, it's the lack of a sense of belonging. When she contemplates a picture of people dancing in a ring, we get it: she's desperately seeking her group of dancers in this life. And as with most desperate people, Madame Raphael ultimately grabs the wrong end of the stick in almost every situation—hence her membership in so many "parties." In the end, Madame has to create a circle dance where there really is none—and make a success of it come hell or high water.
Quote #6
I wandered through the streets of Prague, rings of laughing, dancing Czechs swirled around me, and I knew that I did not belong to them but belonged to Kalandra, who had also come loose from the circular trajectory and had fallen, fallen, to end his fall in a condemned man's coffin, but even though I did not belong to them, I nonetheless watched the dancing with envy and yearning, unable to take my eyes off them. (III.6.5)
Kundera speaks again of his sense of isolation after falling afoul of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia. It's clear that his ideology doesn't jibe 100 percent with the Communists, but he does miss the feeling of being a part of something larger than himself. It's also difficult to see others being included in all the official celebrations, even though he knows these celebrations have been engineered to keep people's minds off the atrocities that are taking place under the regime.
Quote #7
Because ever since they expelled me from the ring dance, I have not stopped falling, I am still falling, and all they have done now is push me once again to make me fall still farther, still deeper, farther and farther from my country into the deserted space of a world where the fearsome laughter of the angels rings out, drowning all my words with its jangle. (III.9.5)
Life as a dissident ain't exactly easy, as Kundera finds out. After speaking out against the Communist regime in his country, he finds himself on the outs in so many ways: professionally, politically, and even as a human being. The government has taken an eraser to his life. Everything he's written has been junked. All prospects for a career have vanished.
His sense of banishment and loneliness take on biblical proportions here, where the laughter of the angels recalls that moment when Adam and Eve are banished by the archangel Michael from the Garden of Eden (check out our summary of Milton's account here).
Quote #8
I imagine the world rising higher and higher around Tamina like a circular wall, and that she is a bit of lawn down at the bottom. Growing on that bit of lawn, there is only a single rose, the memory of her husband. (IV.4.4)
Tamina doesn't realize that her pathological need to connect with the past has to do with a profound sense of isolation and detachment from her present life. All meaning and purpose for her have been left in the grave with her husband. So it's completely appropriate that Kundera envisions Tamina as a kind of prisoner in a green courtyard with only the memory of her husband to keep her company.
Quote #9
General isolation breeds graphomania, and generalized graphomania in turn intensifies and worsens isolation. The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside. (IV.9.14)
Kundera defines graphomania as the urge to write books. And everybody he meets seems to want to write his or her life story as a way to keep him- or herself from disappearing into a void. The problem? When everyone is chatting away on paper, nobody can hear the voices of others. The isolation needed to write becomes a more permanent separation from society—and that just makes everything worse.
Quote #10
"Laughter, on the other hand," Petrarch went on, "is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude. Joking is the barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry." (V. "Boccaccio's Laughter".17)
Petrarch and Boccaccio clearly do not get along. For Boccaccio, love is a series of fart jokes and vulgar pranks; for Petrarch, love is sublime, ethereal, serious work. Kundera seems to side with Petrarch's theory of laughter—it has a way of making the most solemn moments in life into theater of the absurd.