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
And then, while he was moving back and forth on her, he seemed incessantly to be describing the same movement, from childhood to adulthood and then in reverse, and once again from the little boy miserably gazing at the gigantic body of a woman to the man clasping that body and taming it. (II.11.16)
Karel is having a great time living out his childhood sexual fantasies on his mistress Eva's body. As a child, Karel had a little boy crush on Mrs. Nora, his mother's friend. But of course, he was too small to act on it. When his mother remarks that Eva looks a lot like Nora, Karel finds a new way to heighten his arousal: by turning Eva into Nora.
So while he's having sex with Eva (in his wife's presence), Karel is having a kind of metaphysical experience—leaping through time to indulge in those sexual fantasies of his boyhood days. Karel is really not interested in Nora or Eva as people: he's really all about "conquering," bringing something under control that has been out of his grasp for a long, long time.
Quote #2
The moment she removed his head from the body, she felt the strange and intoxicating touch of freedom. That anonymity of the body was a suddenly discovered paradise. With an odd delight, she expelled her wounded and too vigilant soul and was transformed into a simple body without past or memory, but all the more eager and receptive. (II.12.8)
While her husband Karel is engaging in some serious fantasy play during a threesome with Eva, Marketa decides to get in on the game. She finds herself generally not enjoying sex with her husband because, well, she loves him too much and he's a woman-chaser. Marketa has a hard time feeling pleasure because she feels the sorrow of being in such a crummy relationship.
But when she realizes she can take the weight of her sadness and all the problems of her marriage out of the bedroom by mentally decapitating her husband, things get a whole lot better. Marketa can focus on her own sensual pleasure when she doesn't have to worry about her husband's desire or reactions.
Quote #3
And I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any. (III.6.9)
Kundera turns his experience as a dissident into a metaphorical dance that he can't ever rejoin. He recalls the wonderful celebrations held when the Communists had a victory (including executions of "traitors"), and how people came together to dance in a circle. But after he falls out of favor, he can no longer participate in that exclusive brotherhood, though he can see others enjoying the whole Communist "idyll" right before his eyes.
In this case, Kundera describes his feelings of isolation and exile through the widening distance between himself and those who are still in the group—those people fly up into the heavens while he and his fortunes continue to sink. It's a metaphysical description, but it also neatly sums up how physically and mentally hideous Kundera feels at this time in his life.
Quote #4
Whenever she sat facing a man, she would use his head as material for sculpture: gazing intently at him, she would imagine remaking the contours of the face, giving him a darker complexion and putting warts and freckles on it, reducing the ear's size, coloring the eyes blue. (IV.4.7)
Tamina lives so entirely in the past with the memories of her dead husband that she can't even bear to see other men as individuals. Instead, she practices turning every man's face into her husband's. As time goes on, it gets harder for her to do this: Tamina realizes that the image of her husband in her mind's eye is slipping even as the present keeps trying to press in on her. This is an unacceptable change for Tamina. Why? Because the present holds no meaning for her, except the promise of slipping into the future and bringing her closer to death.
Quote #5
She realized that what gave her written memories their meaning and worth was that they were intended for her alone. As soon as they lost that quality, the intimate tie binding her to them would be cut, and she would be able to read them no longer with her own eyes but only with the eyes of readers perusing a document about some other person. Then even she who had written them would become for her some other person, an outsider. (IV.15.3)
Tamina can think of nothing else but retrieving her personal notes from Prague and will do (and actually does do) almost anything to secure them. It's not just about having some nice memories from her marriage; it's about a right to privacy for her intimate thoughts. There is something sacred and serious for her in those pages, since they are the chronicle of her life with her husband.
She knows that the pages won't have the same meaning for others, that they can't value them in the way that she does. When she realizes that others must have already seen the notebooks, Tamina's whole perspective on them changes. The notebooks feel "dirty" to her, like they've been spoiled by prying eyes.
Quote #6
The impression Kristyna created against the backdrop of a small town, with its butchers, mechanics, and pensioners, was entirely different in Prague, the city of pretty students and hairdressers. With her ridiculous beads and her discreet gold tooth...she seemed to personify the negation of that youthful feminine beauty in jeans who had been cruelly rejecting him for months. (V. "Compromise". 2)
Kristyna loses the luster she once had back in her hometown when she appears out of her context. For the young student, this is an unwelcome change, and it makes him regret not only inviting her to his place in Prague, but ever having had an affair (of sorts) with her in the first place. It takes the highfalutin' words of the great poet Goethe to convert Kristyna back into a desired object for the student. We're kind of glad he gets what he deserves in the end.
Quote #7
What Goethe had written to a woman unknown to him was beautiful and sad, yearning and sensual, lively and wise, and the student was certain that such beautiful words had never before been addressed to any woman. He thought of Kristyna and desired her infinitely. Poetry had cast a cloak woven of the most sublime words over her ridiculous clothes. She had been turned into a queen. (V. "Queen".16)
Goethe has a way with words that can actually turn a sow's ear into a silk purse—and that's just what he does for poor, provincial Kristyna. The student is embarrassed by Kristyna's gold tooth and tacky clothes, but Goethe (who's never even seen her) convinces the young man that an aspiring poet needs just such a woman to help keep him real. The student swallows this hook, line, and sinker.
Quote #8
Her father was born on Cernokostelecka Avenue. That was under Austria-Hungary. When her mother married her father and moved in there, it was Marshal Foch Avenue. That was after the 1914-1918 war. Tamina spent her childhood on Stalin Avenue, and it was on Vinohrady Avenue that her husband picked her up to take her to her new home. And yet it was always the same street, they just kept changing its name, brainwashing it into a half-wit. (VI.1.6)
Kundera is preoccupied with shaping (and reshaping) history, and especially by the process of erasure. Here, he illustrates how effectively new political regimes mark the lives of private citizens by doing something as simple as renaming a street. Funny, you'd think that Tamina would be able to remember more of her life simply by recalling the name the street had that year...
Quote #9
It was an unbearable insult to become a corpse. One moment you are a human being protected by modesty, by the sacrosanctity of nakedness and intimacy, and then the instant of death is enough to put your body suddenly at anyone's disposal—to undress it, to rip it open, to scrutinize its entrails, to hold one's nose against its stench, to shove it into the freezer or into the fire. (VI.12.4)
Tamina recognizes that she doesn't fear death for the same reasons that most people do. It's not the whole nonexistence thing that freaks her out—it's the body stuff. She's an intensely private person (think about those notebooks), especially where her body is concerned, so it's not much of a surprise that she'd attach all her death fears to fears of nakedness and being turned into an object.
Quote #10
The ability to gaze turns the hammer into a living being, but a good carpenter must bear its insolent gaze and, with a firm hand, turn it back into a thing. It would seem then that a woman undergoes a cosmic movement upward and then downward: the flight of a thing mutating into a creature and the fall of a creature mutating into a thing. (VII.8.4)
Kundera tries to explain the difference between the male and female gaze by using the hammer/carpenter analogy. While the male gaze (carpenter) turns the female into an object (hammer), it's the "unnatural" gazing back of that object (the woman/hammer) that becomes truly harmful. When an object gazes, it's trying to regain some of its humanity. Then the game is no longer fun: the man has to work harder to re-objectify the woman.
Kundera describes this object-human-object arc just at the moment when Jan is trying to understand how he bungled the encounter with the younger woman on the train.
Quote #11
He realized he was only a hairsbreadth from bursting into laughter. But he knew that if he did, they would no longer be able to make love. Laughter was there like an enormous trap waiting patiently in the room, hidden behind a thin, invisible partition. Only a few millimeters separated physical love from laughter, and he dreaded crossing over them. (VII.9.3)
Jan has a close call with the absurdity of his own life one night while undressing with his married lover. Kundera is clear that laughter is transformative, and not usually in a positive way. He tells us that laughter originates with Satan himself, and although the angels quickly took up the habit, there's no real way of telling which kind of laughter you're witnessing or participating in.
For Jan, laughter in a sexual situation has a way of "castrating" a man, taking away the gravity of the moment and turning the sex act into something ridiculous.