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
He imagined putting into this landscape...Mrs. Nora's naked body, and the thought then came to him that beauty is a spark that flashes when, suddenly, across the distance of years, two ages meet. That beauty is an abolition of chronology and a rebellion against time. (II.13.17)
Karel enters into an elaborate fantasy world in which he can overcome the distance of many years to make love to Mrs. Nora, his mom's beautiful friend that he met as a young child. He senses that this imaginative action will somehow right an injustice of chronology (i.e., that at a young age, he couldn't make love with a sexy lady) and finally quench his insatiable sexual desire.
Karel gets so carried away with this idea that the very actions of love feel like violations of the space-time continuum, allowing him to have sex not only with Eva (who's actually there), but also with the distant (and probably dead) Mrs. Nora.
Quote #2
Just as someone in pain is linked by his groans to the present moment (and is entirely outside past and future), so someone bursting out in such ecstatic laughter is without memory and without desire, for he is emitting his shout into the world's present moment and wishes to know only that. (III.2.5)
Kundera finds that humans live completely in the present on either end of the happiness spectrum; total misery and ecstatic happiness ground us to our place in time. Both of these states of being carry little psychological or historical weight, since we're entirely absorbed in the intensity of the moment. That's heavy, bro.
Quote #3
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 talks about his short-lived gig as an anonymous astrology column writer in Czechoslovakia. He's been dissed by the Communist regime and has lost his social and professional standing, which leaves him a bit short of cash, so a faithful young friend helps him out with the job. Despite his bitter disappointment, Kundera sees the cosmic irony in the whole tragic situation: he's selling superstitious nonsense to people who claim to be skeptics.
Quote #4
Things deprived suddenly of their supposed meaning, of the place assigned to them in the so-called order of things...make us laugh. In origin, laughter is thus of the devil's domain. It has something malicious about it (things suddenly turning out different from what they pretended to be), but to some extent also a beneficent relief (things are less weighty than they appeared to be...) (III.4.4)
Kundera is a bit superstitious in his thinking about laughter: for him, no good can come of it. That's because it strips people and situations of their dignity. It turns solemn occasions into meaningless shows. Laughter transforms perfectly deep extramarital affairs into something ridiculous. And that will never do. While Kundera seems to give some respect to laughter in this passage (he says it makes things less weighty), lightness is not always a good thing. Look at what happens to Tamina (and Czechoslovakia) when they get the lightness they hope for.
Quote #5
Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery. (V."Litost?".5)
Kundera is so taken with the concept of litost that he devotes an entire section of this book to it. Heck, it even takes him several chapters to develop a good working definition of it. Litost is a state of torment that works on two levels: first, there's humiliation or loss, and then there's the need for revenge. It seems that litost belongs particularly to men (at least, in the examples that he gives), and that might be something worth looking into. It seems like Kundera's male characters don't have strong coping mechanisms for the "sudden sight" of their own misery.
Quote #6
Which makes me think that when someone can neither slap a girl who swims too fast nor get himself killed by the Persians, when he has no means of escaping from litost, then poetry's charm flies to his assistance. (V. "Glory".11)
Kundera is tongue in cheek about the student's ability to cope with not only litost but also "litost block"—that horrible condition when a person suffering from litost can't seek revenge on the one who gave them a glimpse of their own misery or unworthiness. While the student has to take responsibility for his longstanding celibacy, Petrarch's poetic reading of Kristyna's "love letter" somehow takes the sting of disappointment away by making the student an object of scholarly admiration.
Quote #7
Man knows he cannot embrace the universe with its suns and stars. Much more unbearable is for him to be condemned to lack the other infinitude, that infinitude near at hand, within reach. Tamina lacked the infinitude of her love, I lacked Papa, and all of us are lacking in our work because in pursuit of perfection we go toward the core of the matter but never quite get to it. (VI.7.6)
Kundera explains his father's theories about Beethoven's variations. He calls them a journey inward, one that explores the great, infinite space of the human mind and soul. It's a much more complex journey than any voyage we can take in the external world, and it offers just as many possibilities of discovery. Each person embodies a particular "infinitude," so that when that person leaves us, it's really that infinite variety and depth that we are missing.
Kundera also says that this is the foundation of all our longing and sorrow, really. It's okay that we can't know the secrets of the universe or even check off everything on our bucket lists. But seems extra disappointing that we can't even get to the core of ourselves during our own lifetimes.
Quote #8
For death is not blue, and Tamina knows it just as well as I know it. Death is terrible drudgery. My father lay dying for days with a fever, and I had the impression that he was working hard. (VI.12.9)
Kundera's personal experience with death overlaps with Tamina's in this section. Both of them are utterly practical: they don't deal in any spiritual fiddle-faddle when it comes to nonexistence, and they won't have any poetry about it, either. While Kundera seems to appreciate Thomas Mann's allegories, he's seen death firsthand, and he knows that it's difficult work to die. He likens his father's journey into death to a hard journey on horseback to a distant place.
Tamina also has her own take on death. She knows it's the end of human dignity and modesty, that it involves a lack of control over who or what gets to have dealings with your body. There's just nothing ethereal about it.
Quote #9
...she had fallen far back to a time when her husband did not exist, when he was neither in memory nor in desire, and thus when there was neither weight nor remorse. (VI.15.1)
Tamina isn't sure why she's on the island with the creepy, hostile children, but she does understand that she's losing some of the angst that she once had when she was living her everyday life. She becomes lighter in being. When she enjoys the sensual pleasures given to her by the children, Kundera says that she's completely one with her body—because her soul has walked out of the room. That's the weighty bit of her, the thing that gave her a past, a memory, and a conscience. It's only when that weight returns to her that Tamina really runs into trouble on the island.
Quote #10
The whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter. (VII.6.5)
Jan has some well-developed ideas about "the border"—except he can't define what it actually is. We're not 100 percent sure what the border separates, other than life and death. It also seems to do with age, or socially acceptable behavior, or where one falls in relation to the political party in power at any given time. The border shifts, but one thing's certain: you're either on the right side of it or the wrong one. And it doesn't take much to cross the line.