Most writers need a wound, either physical or spiritual.

-Amis, Martin Louis
  In the Observer, 30  Aug.

And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

-Bible (Old Testament)
Exodus 21:23^4.

The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise isgone! it isgone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

-Burke, Edmund
  Reflections on the Revolution in France.

In love's field was never found A nobler weapon than a wound.

-Crashaw, Richard
'The Flaming Heart Upon the Book and Picture of Saint Teresa', collectedin Carmen Deo Nostro (publishedposthumously,1652).

Para decirlo de otra manera, no es la herida la que causo¤ el grito, sino exactamente a la inversa; para herirse es preciso el grito, todo lo dema¤  s es un pretexto. In other words, it was not the wound that caused the scream, but precisely the opposite: to get wounded one needs the scream; the rest is only a pretext.

-Eltit, Diamela
  Lumpe¤  rica,1.

The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal woundöthat he will never get over it.

-Frost, Robert Lee
Recalled on his death, 29  Jan1963.

Ich glaube, mann sollte u«  berhaupt nur solche Bu«  cher lesen, die einen beiÞen und stechen. I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.

-Kafka, Franz
  Letter to Oskar Pollack. Collected in Richard and Clara Winston (eds and trans) Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors (1977).

Quand une femme frappe dans le coeur d'une autre, elle manque rarement de trouver l'endroit sensible, et la blessure est incurable. When one woman touches another's heart, she rarely has trouble finding the sensitive spot and the wound is incurable.

-Laclos, Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de
  Les Liaisons dangereuses, letter145.

A reading machine, always wound up and going, He mastered whatever was not worth knowing.

-Lowell,James Russell
  Of a scholar.'A Fable for Critics'.

The politician is trained in the art of inexactitude. His words tend to be blunt or rounded, because if they have a cutting edge they may later return to wound him.

-Murrow, Edward (Edgar) R(oscoe)
Attributed.

Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer; Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike, Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike.

-Pope, Alexander
  Of Addison.'An Epistle to DrArbuthnot', l.201^4.

How right it seemed that he should reach the span Of comfortable years allowed to man! Splendid to eat and sleep and choose a wife, Safe with his wound, a citizen of life. He hobbled blithely through the garden gate, And thought: 'Thank God they had to amputate!'

-Sassoon, Siegfried Louvain
  'The One-Legged Man'.

His fine wit Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it.

-Shelley, Percy Bysshe
  OfThomas Love Peacock.'Letter to Maria Gisborne', l.240^1.

The sailing pine, the cedar proud and tall, The vine-prop elm, the poplar never dry, The builder oak, sole king of forests all, The aspen good for staves, the cypress funeral. The laurel, meed of mighty conquerors And poets sage, the fir that weepeth still, The willow worn of forlorn paramours, The ewe obedient to the benders will, The birch for shafts, the sallow for the mill, The myrrh sweet bleeding in the bitter wound, The warlike beech, the ash for nothing ill, The fruitful olive, and the platan round, The carver holme, the maple seldom inward sound.

-Spenser, Edmund
  The Faerie Queen, bk.1, canto1, stanzas 8^9. plantan=plane tree; holme=holly.

I am going a long way With these thou se'stöif indeed I go (For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)ö To the island-valley of Avilion; Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns And bowery hollows crowed with summer sea, Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.

-Tennyson
  Idylls of the King,'The Passing of Arthur', l.424^32.