Life & Wisdom Quote by J.B. Priestley

Priestley’s line lands because it refuses the usual pieties about marriage and opts for a domestic image so banal it turns poisonous. An “endless visit” is the nightmare version of social obligation: you’re not at home, not fully yourself, performing politeness on someone else’s furniture. By making it endless, he strips away the one comfort that sustains awkward company - the knowledge you can leave.

Then comes the twist of the “worst clothes.” It’s not just discomfort; it’s the particular humiliation of being stuck in a version of yourself you wouldn’t choose. Clothes are social language, signaling mood, status, seduction, readiness. “Worst” implies a stale, underperforming self: the tired outfit you put on when you’ve stopped expecting anything from the day. Priestley suggests marriage can trap people in that diminished register, where the effort of presentation gives way to resignation and the imagination shrinks to fit routine.

The subtext is less “marriage is bad” than “marriage is an institution that can turn intimacy into obligation.” Priestley, writing from a Britain shaped by class codes and stiff respectability, knew how performance infiltrates private life. For a 20th-century writer who watched social roles harden between wars and loosen after them, the joke carries a warning: when partnership becomes a permanent visit, you stop renovating your inner home. The comedy stings because it’s plausible - and because everyone recognizes the dread of being overdressed for no one, or worse, underdressed for forever.