Mind you, flatulence was one skill he had bettered as he had got older. - Stephen Baxter

It seems to me that age, growing old, is a war between wisdom and bitterness. I’m not sure how I’ll come out of that war myself, assuming I get so far.
Maybe some things are more important than life itself.
But what?

“So that’s that,” Miriam said. “We have a plan.”
“You have a shared delusion,” I said.

The rodents’ vast litters incidentally offered up much raw material to the blind sculptors of natural selection; their evolutionary rate was ferocious.