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 #7
It is a death sweetly bluish, like nonbeing. Because nonbeing is an infinite emptiness and empty space is blue and there is nothing more beautiful and more soothing than blue. Not at all by chance did Novalis, the poet of death, love blue and search for nothing else on his journeys. Death's sweetness is blue in color. (VI.12.7)
Kundera often discusses metaphysical things by talking about them in everyday terms, as they are in the physical world. But it's not exclusively his idea to do this: he brings Thomas Mann and the philosopher Novalis into the novel to show that the beautification of difficult or ugly parts of our existence (like death) has a longstanding tradition. Kundera will refute these other writers on the subject of death, which he thinks is definitely not a lovely and soothing shade of blue—but he likes to open up these alternative views of the world for us.
Quote #8
All of us are prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages its guerilla war, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise. (VII.2.3)
It's just as the writers of Star Trek hypothesized decades ago—there's an alternate timeline or set of worlds out there in which all possible outcomes are playing out. Okay, Kundera may not actually be thinking about alternate worlds, but he is interested in the small details of life that play out behind the scenes of the larger dramas we undergo. It's all these little things adding up and working together that will have an enormous (if quiet) impact on our lives when we least expect it.
Quote #9
Jan suddenly saw himself through the young woman's eyes. He saw that pitiful pantomime of his gaze and gesture, that stereotyped gesticulation emptied of all meaning by years of repetition. Having lost its spontaneity, its natural, immediate meaning, his gesture suddenly made him unbearably weary, as if six-kilo weights had been attached to his wrists. (VII.7.7)
Jan gets a glimpse of what it is to be a woman who has to listen to his most tired pick-up lines, and it's not a pleasant experience. When the world flip-flops for him like this, Jan can't help but be discouraged and disappointed by his behavior. The problem is, he doesn't feel that he can change; he only knows that he's lost his old groove and he can't get it back again.