Max Payne is one of the most iconic characters to ever have been created in video game history. He has seen it all from loss of his child, his wife, to the loss of the assassin whom he loved.
Throughout his detective career, Max was philosophical and mostly existential. Here are some of the quotes from the series, that only show what an interesting character he was, but also how well-written our anti-hero was.
- “I don’t know about angels, but it’s fear that gives men wings.”
- “You piece together a jigsaw and the final picture is you finishing that same puzzle, a mad green-eyed killer standing behind you. An urban legend come true.”
- “Vlad was right. There are no choices. Nothing but a straight line. The illusion comes afterwards, when you ask ‘Why me?’ and ‘What if?’. When you look back and see the branches, like a pruned bonsai tree, or forked lightning. If you had done something differently, it wouldn’t be you. It would be someone else looking back, asking a different set of questions.”
- “They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation mark to everything that had led to this point. I released my finger from the trigger. And then it was over. To make any kind of sense of it, I need to go back three years. Back to the night the pain started.”
- “So I guess I’d become what they wanted me to be, a killer. Some rent-a-clown with a gun who puts holes in other bad guys. Well, that’s what they had paid for, so in the end that’s what they got. Say what you want about Americans but we understand capitalism. You buy yourself a product and you get what you pay for, and these chumps had paid for some angry gringo without the sensibilities to know right from wrong. Here I was about to execute this poor bastard like some dime store angel of death and I realized they were correct, I wouldn’t know right from wrong if one of them was helping the poor and the other was banging my sister…”
- “Haven’t you figured it out?!? I DON’T SPEAK YOUR FUCKING LANGUAGE!!!”
- “Sure, trouble finds us the way you found me, slumped in a bar, drunk on self-pity.”
- “The trouble with wanting something is the fear of losing it, or never getting it. The thought makes you weak.”
- “When you’re stuck in a foreign country and don’t know the words for “reverse charges” and you’re in some lonely skin joint in the middle of some poor slum and just had every last cent robbed from you and you call yourself a bodyguard then you know you’re a loser.”
- “Your past is like pieces of a broken mirror. You try to pick them up, but you only end up cutting yourself.”
- “Einstein was right, time is relative to the observer. When you’re looking down the barrel of a gun, time slows down. Your whole life flashes by in front of you, heartbreak and scars. Stay with it, and you can live a lifetime in that split second…”
- “Soon you’d find out lady luck was really a hooker, and you’re fresh out of cash.”
- “He was trying to buy more sand for his hourglass. I wasn’t selling any.”
- “The explosion in my apartment had started a fire. The flames couldn’t burn away my past. They only made the shadows behind me leap higher.”