"He realizes that the vengeance—the bad karma—he’d hoped for, for all the rules the man had broken, all the cheating ways he had gotten ahead, wasn’t coming. Because it was already there. As he writes. I had expected something conclusive and fatal and now I realized that **what was coming to him was not a sudden pay-off but a process, a disease he had caught in the epidemic that swept over his birthplace like a plague; a cancer that was slowly eating him away, the symptoms developing and intensifying: success, loneliness, fear.** Fear of all the bright young men, the newer, fresher [[Sammy Glicks]] that would spring up to harass him, to threaten him and finally overtake him." ([Location 2451](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01AWUTMB0&location=2451)) --- **Tags** -- [[quotes]], [[juicy-sentences]], [[humility]], [[ego]], [[progressing-slowly]], [[loneliness]], [[fear]], [[character]], [[personal-values]] **Source** -- [[202409161103 - B - Ego is the Enemy]]