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
Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history and, of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on the balcony. (I.1.4)
The Communist regime in Czechoslovakia has a way of owning the past and reshaping it for its own purposes. With some handy-dandy photographic techniques, whole people can disappear from history as if they were never there at all. But here's the punchline: everybody knows about the manipulation. No one's really being fooled. The Communists are not really interested in pulling the wool over anybody's eyes (okay, maybe some people's eyes); the ability to alter the past is just another weapon in their arsenal of punishment.
Quote #2
I emphasize: idyll and for all, because all human beings have always aspired to an idyll, to that garden where nightingales sing, to that realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man and man against other men, but rather where the world and all men are shaped from one and the same matter. (I.5.5)
It's a nice dream that the Communists want everyone to believe in. In fact, it's part of their initial popularity among the intellectual set in Czechoslovakia (including Kundera). But it's this fierce commitment to an unrealistic ideal that turns the dream into a nightmare.
Quote #3
He told everyone that he had broken permanently with his father, a well-off farmer. He spat, he said, on the age-old rural tradition of attachment to land and to property. He described the scene of the quarrel and his dramatic departure from the parental home. There was not an ounce of truth to any of this. (I.13.5)
When Mirek tries to get on the good side of the Communist Party, he creates an entirely different family story for himself, one that will jibe with their ideals. It doesn't matter that none of it is true; Mirek's just participating in the favorite activity of the day: historical revisionism.
Quote #4
But are tanks really more important than pears? As time went by, Karel realized that the answer to this question was not as obvious as he had always thought, and he began to feel a secret sympathy for Mama's perspective, which had a big pear tree in the foreground and somewhere in the distance a tank no bigger than a ladybug, ready at any moment to fly away out of sight. (II.2.5)
As Karel mellows with age and forgets how much he couldn't stand his mother, he begins to think that her annoying ways were really not so bad. One instance in particular—her anger at a neighbor for not picking her pears while the Russians invaded—used to drive him bonkers. But now he begins to see her point of view on the subject. It's not that the Russian tanks weren't important to her; it's just that the rotting pears were more pressing.
Quote #5
Dominion over the world, as we know, is divided between angels and devils. The good of the world, however, implies not that the angels have the advantage over the devils (as I believed when I was a child) but that the powers of the two sides are nearly in equilibrium. (III.4.3)
Kundera tries to explain why laughter is such a complicated thing. To do so, he has to move into another realm. First, we have to understand that angels aren't the sweet, fluffy, white creatures that pop culture believes them to be; they're powerful and terrifying. And devils? Well, the world needs them to keep the angels in check. This is definitely not the world of your average Sunday school class.
Quote #6
This book is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme, the interior of a thought, the interior of a single, unique situation, the understanding of which recedes from my sight into the distance. (VI.8.1)
Kundera gives us some explanation about his book, which is very nice of him, really. He's talking first about his father's work on Beethoven's variations, and he reveals to us that he's nicked that form for his work. In other words, we can think of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as a series of variations on a theme. Kundera's use of this form goes a long way to helping us understand why his novel reads more like a collection of short stories: he's interested in exploring a set of themes rather than a unified plot. Most importantly, it's a journey inward, into the infinitude of inner life. Trippy.
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.
Quote #10
He realized he was only a hairsbreadth away from the 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, like Petrarch before him in this work, understands love to be a very serious state of being. If something like joking or laughter makes its way into a relationship, he knows he'll just have to end it because there will be no more solemn purpose or meaning to his actions in love. He knows this especially well because he's come close to blowing a perfectly good affair with a married woman by giving in to her smile. One small step toward laughter, and the mood would have been gone.