raw nerve

It came from the mouth of an American businessman, but it struck a raw nerve here in France.

The language, coming as public concern about income inequality has reached record highs, strikes an already raw nerve.

Your mother looks at you that way sometimes in church, when the sermon touches a particularly raw nerve in your spiritual make-up.

As the number of the years of Alice's life was sadly told out, every stroke was to her as if it fell upon a raw nerve.

The steam in one of the radiators began to thump and clang, and each crash smote a raw nerve in his beating temple.

Now that he had probed for and reached the raw nerve of feeling, he intended to keep it tight gripped in the forceps of his words.

The racked muscles refused to be still; the raw nerve-centres refused to soothe themselves in the peace of complete senselessness.