Meantime Quotes

“Every little snowflake is unique, but it's all just snow.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“But which of us knows how we'd really behave in a life or death situation? So why judge anyone? The facts of life are fairly brutal when you get right down to it. Everyone's plane is going down, and you can't really judge the people who are screaming.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“Swimming is like life – a couple of kids can ruin everything.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“Maybe Scottish people have been imprisoned in the English language and we are trying to blow our way out.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“I'm an optimist for the future of the human race because soon mankind will have liberated itself from it's wheel of suffering by killing anything we could possibly be reincarnated into”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“Rom-coms are innately radical. The central point is that it's always about a second relationship. It's about someone getting out of something that doesn't work, and into something that does. The rom-com says no matter how inescapable your current situation seems, you can escape, just not on your own. And this is also the message of radical socialism.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“Can a computer program be conscious?’ Sophie laughed. ‘Can a submarine swim? That’s how Noam Chomsky answers that one. Whether we call it consciousness or not, it’ll effectively be the same thing.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“Glasgow did have the occasional statue of a scientist or whatever, but it was largely mass murderers. Field Marshal Lord Roberts, the plinth said, hero of the Indian Rebellion of 1858.This was Britain, and if you killed enough foreigners, they let you ride a metal horse into the future.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“I’d dated a few women who’d been on the pill, without really understanding what it did; I think I thought weight gain and depression were just side effects of going out with me.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“He brought out a book of upbeat platitudes in the wake of the financial crash that was billed as ‘the literary equivalent of a hug’, but was actually the literary equivalent of trying to fuck someone when they were depressed.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“She was in the year above me and manning a stall about the right to choice in Northern Ireland. It was a cause I totally agreed with: I’d been to Northern Ireland a bunch, and you always met someone who should have been aborted.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“I’ve injected you both with sodium pentothal. Old school. What they used to call truth serum.’ Amy’s head lifted slowly and her voice cracked with indignation. ‘Great, I’ve got a fucking hipster torturer.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“It’s been an incredible period in our nation’s history, hasn’t it? Personally, if I had a time machine and could do it all again … I’d go back to when I was sixteen, and kill myself.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“I’d worked with so many gay guys in bars, and they were so patient when it came to explaining their horniness in detail, that I thought I’d come to understand some of the aesthetic of what they looked for in guys. It was imperfection, and a kind of unaffected masculinity, I suppose. A broken nose was a lot more attractive than you’d think, basically. It seemed a healthy aesthetic for me – if you’re looking for realness, you’re looking for intimacy.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“He had metallic grey-white hair and that air that a lot of Scottish men in their sixties have: a kind of smugness from having outlived everyone they know. He looked like the star of a five-part docudrama about a game-show host accused of necrophilia”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“It’s amazing that the people of Gotham remain steadfastly philanthropic – still turning up to Wayne Foundation balls where the previous year they were gassed by a psychotic clown. Just because the last time you went out your wife was kidnapped by a human crocodile and your son got turned into clay, doesn’t mean that the library couldn’t use a refurbishment …”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“A drag act? So fuck? We had a priest at school – full time.’ I heard my voice rise and crack with indignation. ‘An actual paedophile wizard!”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“I said, ‘God bless you,’ to mask the regular horror I have when people sneeze; not because of germs, but because I always feel I’ve just seen their cumface.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“I got another round in and talked Jane through my thoughts on how we’re the first people in history to be ruled by incompetent fascists, and how we’re going to end up going to the death camps on a replacement bus service,”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“I should at least have taken pleasure in telling him that I was ending the family line. That I was taking millennia of refinements to his DNA, and blasting them into the barren soil of a barista’s arsehole.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“A woman can share an anecdote about the embarrassment of a customs officer finding her vibrator as a dinner party anecdote, whereas a man letting slip that he spent a holiday fucking a fleshlight can only ever be the grimmest of red flags.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“Oh, aye. I worry about everything. Sometimes I worry that our whole reality is the memory palace of a serial killer, and one day he’ll walk into the pub where I’m having lunch, read his aunt’s phone number from the underside of a beermat, and the universe will disappear, having fulfilled its purpose.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“You’d never get a Scottish version of The Matrix, because anyone up here who was offered two pills would just gub both of them.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“You had trouble answering the phone? You neurodivergent cunt.’ Donnie had been sent on compulsory equalities training after some work catastrophe, where he had been compelled to learn a raft of terms he now used as abuse.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“She wore a sharp black blazer, tight even on her thin shoulders, and had immaculate collar-length curly hair. Yet, somehow, this all hinted at a profound internal dishevelment, like her friends had forced her to dress up for a night out because she’d been depressed.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“People trying to be cool in Glasgow don’t have loads of reference points to work with, so they often have to cobble together a personality from movie characters and food allergies”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“Glasgow was often rated as one of the happiest cities in the world, possibly because the people who researched these things didn’t understand sarcasm.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“I was always attracted to women like this. Very emphatic, clever women. My therapist thought that this might be because my problems maintaining attention meant that I had to outsource intellectual stimulation, something I’d meant to read up on but hadn’t.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“I can only stay optimistic by staying offline. People are fine in the abstract, but it’s hard when you actually have to hear what they think.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror behind the bar. The tasteful lighting somehow accentuated my horrific appearance: I looked like a hostage video with an Instagram filter.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime