Ron Howard Quotes

The ordinariness of living to be old is too novel a thing to appreciate.

When a loved one passes, there are mixed emotions, and a thirst to live one's own life more deeply can certainly be among them.

When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity - but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

I've got too many of my friends that retired and went home and got on a rocking chair, and about a year and a half later, I'm always going to the cemetery.

Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.

How do I confront aging? With a wonder and a terror. Yeah, I'll say that. Wonder and terror.

Old age is a shipwreck.

I've been writing about growing old for some time, really from the beginning of my career. It's something I'm apparently hung up about and now that I am old, hopefully I speak about it with some authority.

I'm aging, and the world is seeing it.

There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.

Probably the only thing that I really don't like about being an old guy is so many of the people who understand what we know are gone.

Death makes us sad, but it can also make us feel more alive.

I'm not cynical, but the reality is that life is mortal. Terrible, sad things happen. Everybody loses friends and family. I'll be on tour and get really scared if my wife won't answer her phone within one minute. I'm sensitive.

Death is natural, and it happens early for some people. I acknowledge that, and in the next sentence, reject it, because it just sucks. It hurts. I can at the same time acknowledge it as true, and then have my protest against it.

One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not everybody is goin to get older with you.

Gail Godwin has written a book about the heaviest matters of loss, grief, and loneliness with a touch so light that I was as often deeply amused by it as I was deeply moved.

It’s odd, isn’t it? People die every day and the world goes on like nothing happened. But when it’s a person you love, you think everyone should stop and take notice. That they ought to cry and light candles and tell you that you’re not alone.

Nobility and self-sacrifice sound wonderful in theory, but now he’s seen how it feels. A dead hero is still dead at the end of the day, and you’re still alone.

For it must be very lonely being dead.

When you know that someone close to you is going to die, there's a natural tendency to want to spend as much time with them as you can.

I have a picture I keep in my wallet of my father's corpse... I keep that picture in my wallet to show people who show me baby pictures.

It's not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is part of being alive, something we all share.

The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most: we that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends.

I like to think that when I fall, A rain-drop in Death's shoreless sea, This shelf of books along the wall, Beside my bed, will mourn for me.