No Time to Make It Shorter.

Ben Yagoda wrote at Facebook: The discovery of the day comes from the indefatigable quote investigator Garson O’Toole, acting on a tip from Nigel Rees and Peter Cogman. As some of my former students will recall, one of my favorite quotes about writing has always been from French author Blaise Pascal, who wrote to a friend in 1656 or 1657 (sources differ), “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” On the American Dialect Society listserv, Garson has shared a rendition of this sentiment that came from another French writer, Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac in 1652. It indicates Pascal was riffing on an existing formulation (the capitalization is in the original): “‘THAT MAN,’ people used to say in Paris when I was there, ‘WROTE A LONG BOOK BECAUSE HE DID NOT HAVE THE LEISURE TO WRITE A SHORT ONE.'” Consider my world rocked. I too have long loved that quote, and I too was shaken; you can read the whole story at Quote Investigator, where you will see Guez de Balzac’s…