Make a Long Story Short

The impulse behind this phrase is ancient. The Roman writer Pacuvius used a similar line around 160 BC, and the English version is documented in print from 1857. Beyond that, its exact coining is unrecorded. It's thought to come from oral storytelling, a narrator signalling to their audience that they're about to skip the finer details, and Henry David Thoreau captured the underlying irony neatly in a letter: "Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long time to make it short."