A friend recently shared this commencement speech given by author Kurt Vonnegut in 1999, which included this passage that I thought beautiful:

Don't give up on books. They feel so good - their friendly heft, the sweet reluctance of their pages when you turn them with your sensitive fingertips. A large part of our brains is devoted to deciding whether what our hands are touching is good or bad for us. Any brain worth a nickel knows books are good for us.

I often will hold my book even after I am finished reading at night just because I'm not quite ready to relinquish it to the table, so you can imagine how these words made sense to me. I can imagine a novelist describing it: Under the covers, she grasped her book with both hands folded, a sort of prayer for the pages or as she drifted off, the stories told and untold in the book she clutched acted as a pacifier for her hectic brain.