“Christ did not ask or want to be what he was not.”

“Did Jesus Christ, he asked, suspect that someday his church would spread to the farthest corners of Earth? Did Jesus Christ, he asked, ever have what we, today, call an idea of the world? Did Jesus Christ, who apparently knew everything, know that the world was round and to the east lived the Chinese (this sentence he spat out, as if it cost him great effort to utter it) and to the west the primitive peoples of America? And he answered himself, no, although of course in a way having an idea of the world is easy, everybody has one, generally an idea restricted to one's village, bound to the land, to the tangible and mediocre things before one's eyes, and this idea of the world, petty, limited, crusted with the grime of the familiar, tends to persist and acquire authority and eloquence with the passage of time.”

“Scientists want to search for alien signals because that's what gets them publicity. They are like Jesus Christ.""Jesus Christ?" Nambodri asked, with a faintly derogatory chuckle."Yes. They are exactly like Jesus Christ. You know that he turned water into wine.""I've heard that story.""From the point of view of pure chemistry, it is more miraculous to make wine into water than water into wine. But he did not do that. Because if he had gone to someone's house and converted their wine into water, they would have crucified him much earlier. He knew, Jana. He knew making water into wine was a more popular thing to do.”

“How different our standard is from Christ's. We ask how much a man gives. Christ asks how much he keeps.”

“What did you see?' he asked then.Nothing,' I told him. 'Because nothing is what you wanted me to see, though the man on the table might disagree.”

“He wondered if this, more than guilt, was what had been holding him back. It wasn't that he was punishing himself as much as it was that he didn't really want anything anymore. But was that true? Did he really not want anything? What did he want to do? What did he want, period?”