Max quotes from Black Sails

Max

Pleasure should be shared equally. It's the only way to avoid hurt feelings.

Max

When a man is being fucked, he wants to know whose cock was in him.

Max

This place is just sand. It cannot love you back.

Max

Sand has its virtues. On sand, nothing is fixed. Nothing is permanent. And fates change so quickly. Yesterday I was a whore of little consequence. Easily dismissed, easily forgotten. Today I am a madame, with an income, and allies. A woman who has learned the most important of lessons: never let anyone stand between you and your ambitions.

Max

I own a tavern, a brothel, a tanner, a butcher--interests in a dozen other concerns on the street. I am the one they come to here when they need things, want things, fear things. In another time and another place, they would call me a queen. I built this from nothing. And none of it is real. Because it is built upon things I cannot control, cannot predict. It is built on sand. And when the day comes when that foundation shifts, when civilization returns, do you know what they will call me then? The whore that lost everything.

Max

I am here in part to secure my own future. I will not apologize for that.

Max

When I was very small, I would sneak out of the slave quarters at night to the main house. I would stand outside the window to the parlor. I would stand amongst the heat and the bugs and the filth on my toes to see inside. Inside that house was a little girl, my age, with the most beautiful skin. I watched her dance while her father played music and her mother sewed. I watched her read and eat and sing and sleep, kept safe and warm and clean by her father. My father. The things it took to make that room possible, they were awful things. But inside that room was peace. That is what home is to me.

Max

[to Anne] I remember when I first met Eleanor, how stunned I was. A woman who spoke the way she did, cu had no fear of the world or the men who reigned over it. When I became her lover, I watched the decisions she made and resolved to learn from them. When I became her rival, I watched the mistakes she made and resolved never to repeat them. But at the end, when I felt I had surpassed her in every way, it seemed as though there was something she was still trying to say to me. Surrendering everything she had sacrificed so dearly for, because it would have come at the expense of someone she loved. She was trying to tell me, I just could not hear her, about what was truly important. I said no to Marion Guthrie's plan, despite having no alternative and at the risk of losing the entire endeavor, because I refuse to situate a man in a position where he might interfere one day with my ability to repair things with you. You are the bravest person I have ever known. The truest person I have ever known. And I betrayed you and it sickens me. I am so sorry for working so hard to protect the wrong things. For failing to see that there is nothing important that does not include you.