There is a particular kind of man who mistakes the delay of consequences for the avoidance of them, and Marcus was that kind of man, and it destroyed him.

You cannot have everything.

The attempt to have everything is not ambition; it is a refusal to choose, and life is made entirely of choices, and the person who refuses to make them does not get to keep all his options.

He simply loses the right to choose which one is taken from him.

Marcus wanted to choose nothing and keep everything, and so in the end he lost everything, and chose none of it.

“When the boys were born,” he said, and looked up, “something shifted in me.