by William Penn
They that love beyond the World, cannot be separated by it.
Death cannot kill, what never dies.
Nor can Spirits ever be divided that love and live in the same Divine Principle; the Root and Record of their Friendship.
If Absence be not death, neither is theirs.
Death is but Crossing the World, as Friends do the Seas; They live in one another still.
For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is Omnipresent.
In this Divine Glass, they see Face to Face; and their Converse is Free, as well as Pure.
This is the Comfort of Friends, that though they may be said to Die, yet their Friendship and Society are, in the best Sense, ever present, because Immortal.
These words are #127-134, from Part II on Union of Friends in Penn’s collection More Fruits of Solitude.
J.K. Rowling used these words of Penn as the epigraph of her novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The relationship between Penn’s reflections on death & Rowling’s novel is discussed in a 2008 blogpost on Hogwarts Professor: Thoughts for Serious Readers called “Deathly Hallows’ and Penn’s Fruits of Solitude”