Reading from All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

I could lie there as long as I wanted, and let all the pictures of things a man might want run through my head, coffee, a girl, money, a drink, white sand and blue water, and let them all slide off, one after the other, like a deck of cards slewing slowly off your hand.  Maybe the things you want are like cards.  You don't want them for themselves, really, though you think you do.  You don't want a card because you want the card, but because in a perfectly arbitrary system of rules and values and in a special combination of which you are already a part the card has meaning.  But suppose you aren't sitting in a game.  Then, even if you do know the rules, a card doesn't mean a thing.  They all look alike.

So I could lie there, though I knew that I would get up after a spell - not deciding to get  up but just all at once finding myself standing in the middle of the floor just as later on, I would find myself, with a shock of recognition, taking coffee, changing a bill, handling a girl, drawing on a drink, floating in the water.  Like an amnesia case playing solitaire in the hospital, I would get up and deal myself a hand, all right.  Later on.  But for the present I would lie there and know I didn't have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark night of the soul.  For God and Nothing have a lot in common.  You look either one of them straight in the eye for a second and the immediate effect on the human constitution is the same.