“… like a grain of sand that gets into an oyster's shell. What if the grain doesn't want to become a pearl? Is it ever asked to climb out quietly and take up its old position as a bit of ocean floor?”

In Cold Blood (1965)

"View with a Grain of Sand"
Poems New and Collected (1998), The People on the Bridge (1986)
Context: We call it a grain of sand
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect or apt.

Source: The Beach Trees

"Little Things" in the Myrtle (1845). This poem came to be published uncredited as a children's rhyme and hymn in many 19th century magazines and books, sometimes becoming variously attributed to Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, Daniel Clement Colesworthy, and Frances S. Osgood, but the earliest publications of it clearly are those of Carney, according to Our Woman Workers: Biographical Sketches of Women Eminent in the Universalist Church for Literary, Philanthropic and Christian Work (1881) by E. R. Hanson, as well as Familiar Quotations 9th edition (1906) edited by John Bartlett, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1999) by Elizabeth Knowles and Angela Partington, and The Yale Book of Quotations (2006), ed. Fred R. Shapiro.

Song lyrics, Shot of Love (1981), Every Grain Of Sand
Variant: "I am hanging in the balance of a perfect, finished plan" (The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1–3)

Quote of Friedrich on his painting Swans in the Rushes (c. 1820), as cited in "Absent Presences in Liminal Places: Murnau's Nosferatu and the Otherworld of Stoker's Dracula" by Saviour Catania in Literature Film Quarterly (2004) http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3768/is_200401/ai_n9377557/print
1794 - 1840

Source: My Sister's Keeper