John Milton:
"Into this wilde Abyss, / The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave, / Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire, / But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt / Confus’dly, ..."
Daniel Defoe:
"And now I thought myself pretty well freighted, and began to think how I should get to shore with them, having neither sail, oar, or rudder, and the least capful of wind would have overset all my navigation."
William Wordsworth:
"Neither vice nor guilt, / Debasement undergone by body or mind, / Nor all the misery forced upon my sight, / Misery not lightly passed, but sometimes scanned / Most feelingly, could overthrow my trust / In what we may become"
Thomas Macaulay:
"Neither blindness, nor gout, nor age, nor penury, nor domestic afflictions, nor political disappointments, nor abuse, nor proscription, nor neglect, had power to disturb his sedate and majestic patience."
Jonathan Swift:
"I find likewise that your printer has been so careless as to confound the times, and mistake the dates, of my several voyages and returns; neither assigning the true year, nor the true month, nor day of the month"
George Bernard Shaw:
"But there are men who can neither read, write, nor cipher, to whom the answer to such sums as I can do is instantly obvious without any conscious calculation at all; and the result is infallible."
G K Chesterton:
"He takes us into the schools of inhumanist learning, where there are neither books nor flowers, nor wine nor wisdom, but only deformities in glass bottles, and where the rule is taught from the exceptions."
Since the above are all notable English (or in two cases Irish) writers, here are a few notable Americans.
Herman Melville:
"But neither great Washington, nor Napoleon, nor Nelson, will answer a single hail from below, however madly invoked to befriend by their counsels the distracted decks upon which they gaze"
H L Mencken:
"I am thus neither teacher, nor prophet, nor reformer, but merely inquirer."
Mark Twain:
"It is not pleasant to see an American thrusting his nationality forward obtrusively in a foreign land, but Oh, it is pitiable to see him making of himself a thing that is neither male nor female, neither fish, flesh, nor fowl--a poor, miserable, hermaphrodite Frenchman!"
