“The lesson they took home with them was simple; it takes a full belly before a man or woman gives a tinker’s damn about anything as large as a planet.”

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 1, section 3 (p. 18)

"The Larger College".
In Classic Shades, and Other Poems (1890)
Context: p>Man's books are but man's alphabet,
Beyond and on his lessons lie — The lessons of the violet,
The large gold letters of the sky; The love of beauty, blossomed soil, The large content, the tranquil toil:The toil that nature ever taught,
The patient toil, the constant stir,
The toil of seas where shores are wrought,
The toil of Christ, the carpenter;
The toil of God incessantly
By palm-set land or frozen sea.</p

Describing the events of the Sand Creek massacre in the prologue of the book
There There (2018)
Source: As quoted in [Buchanan, Rowan Hisayo, There There by Tommy Orange review – Native American stories, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/18/there-there-tommy-orange-review, 9 August 2018, The Guardian, July 18, 2018]

(12 August 2005)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2005
Context: Sometimes, I think that the most alien thing to mankind is mankind itself. The real aliens live next door or across the border or somewhere overseas. Each man and woman defines the world about them, creating a set of those things which they consider "normal" and "good" and "evil" and "sympathetic" and "likable," and these are damned indomitable walls. They are high and thick, and it is the task of the writer to penetrate or scale them. To break in. To shatter preconceptions. To force people to rethink cherished opinions and prejudices.

To George Sand, A Desire http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/ebbrowning/bl-ebbrown-togeorge1.htm (1844).

Source: Sweet Surrender

Source: Island of the Blue Dolphins

Revolution (2014)

Variant: It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.... Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.
Source: A Room of One's Own