Aging & Wisdom Quote by J.B. Priestley

Priestley’s line lands like a dry, perfectly timed heckle from the wings: respect, that supposedly stable social currency, turns out to be a moving target. The joke is structural. He builds a neat symmetry - youth then, age now - and then punctures it with the real punchline: the self is always arriving just after the era that would have treated it well. “I missed it coming and going” frames life as a station platform where the train of cultural esteem never stops long enough for you to board.

The intent is more than grumbling nostalgia. Priestley is exposing how “respect” is often less a moral achievement than a generational fashion, granted and withdrawn by the crowd’s latest anxieties. When he was young, youth was cheap - inexperienced, disposable, not yet authoritative. In old age, the problem flips: modernity prizes speed, novelty, and the future, making age feel like a drag on the collective storyline. He’s not claiming either cohort inherently deserves deference; he’s mocking the social reflex to romanticize whichever life stage we’re not currently inhabiting.

Context matters: Priestley lived through two world wars, the rise of mass media, and the acceleration of consumer culture - periods that repeatedly rewired who gets listened to and why. The subtext is a quiet indictment of societies that outsource dignity to demographics. By centering his own bad timing, he avoids moral grandstanding and lets the reader feel the sting: the respect you’re told to earn may never have been yours to claim.