More McDermott

From "Culture":

The most perilous threat to human life is secondhandedness, living out the bequest of our parents, siblings, relatives, teachers, and other dispensers of already programmed possibilities. We should be wary of the inherited, however noble its intention, for it is the quality of our own experience which is decisive. Failure, deeply undergone, often enriches, whereas success achieved mechanically through the paths set out by others often blunts sensibility. We are not dropped into the world as a thing among things. We are live creatures who eat experience.