Resignation Quotes

“If you want to know what’s your boss is really like, go to his office with a resignation letter. You will then see your boss’s true colours. You will then see his emotions without any filters. No boss can ever fake himself in front of an employee who has just resigned.”
― Abhaidev, The World's Most Frustrated Man

“Sometimes resignation brings relief. When you lose hope, you no longer bother struggling. You just stay benumbed like a vegetable and let your head chopped off by a guillotine so that it ends, once and for all.”
― Abhaidev, The Meaninglessness of Meaning

“What could I say? That I didn't care about living? That with every day of life more and more is being subtracted from less and less? Minus this second. Minus this second. That I was tired of collecting the millions of minutes, killing the idle thousands of hours?”
― Jeffrey Moore, The Extinction Club

“You might be better served if she didn't wake. What happens when she discovers how you've deceived her? When she realises her role in your plan?'

I try not to move, try not to let a twitch of muscle or a tightening of my body give away that I am conscious and listening.

Oak's voice is full of resignation. 'She will have to decide how much she hates me.'

'Kill her while you can,' says the old general, softly. He sounds regretful but also resigned.

'That's your answer to everything,' Oak says.

'And yours is to throw yourself into the mouth of the lion and hope it doesn't like your savour.”
― Holly Black, The Stolen Heir

“I heard this drop and drop like rain outside
Fast-falling through the darkness while she spoke...”
― Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

“It strikes me, Ernest said, that he has lost his objectivity. It's so caught in the latter of these events and feelings, that he totally identified with them. We need to find a way to help him detach a little. We need to help him see himself from a distance, even from a cosmic perspective. Your client has become one with his problems – he has lost the feeling of continuity of the self that lives these events, which constitute only a small glimpse of his existence. And what makes matters worse is his assumption that the current unhappiness is going to be permanent — always the same. Of course, that's a characteristic of depression – the combination of sadness and pessimism.”
― Irvin Yalom, Lying on the Couch

“And so, Athene, the prayer I offer is this: thank you for bringing my husband home, if that is what you have done. If the man who sleeps upstairs in the bed he once carved from an old olive tree is an impostor, I suppose I will find out soon enough. He knows the old stories of our marriage, of that I am certain. And Telemachus is devoted to him, which is fortunate. So perhaps it does not matter if he is the man who left, or a changed man, or even another man altogether. He fits in the space that Odysseus left."
- Your devoted Penelope”
― Natalie Haynes, A Thousand Ships

“It all depended on what Walter decided. If - if he really did care about Rose Barum, she wouldn't stand in his way. It was so glaringly indecent to hold on to one's husband if he wanted someone else. The trouble was that she didn't know what Walter did want, and this was one of those questions you really couldn't ask.”
― Ann Bridge, Illyrian Spring

“To wit, that this dreadful matter brought from these downtrodden people no outburst of rage against their oppressors. They had been heritors and subjects of cruelty and outrage so long that nothing could have startled them but kindness. Yes, here was a curious revelation indeed, of the depth to which this people had been sunk into slavery. Their entire being was reduced to a monotonous dead level of patience, resignation, dumb uncomplaining acceptance of whatever might befall them in this life. Their very imagination was dead. When you can say that of a man, he has struck bottom, I reckon; there is no lower deep for him.”
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

“That night, I was deaf, blind, and empty. Nothing could affect me; no monsters visited, no demons sought my company. I had nothing to lose and nothing to fight for. So, I closed my eyes and journeyed through an eternal void—a world of nothingness and endless emptiness. Life comes and goes, you came, you left, my empty heart was the only thing that never left me alone.”
― Rolf van der Wind

“The relief was immense. Quiet dismissal. Perfect, perfect joy of throwing it all away.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Things would have turned out better if she had lived. As it was, she died when I was a kid; and though everything that's happened to me since then is thoroughly my own fault, still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Complacency is the enemy of all progress. So is resignation. If you believe you are perfect, then you make no effort to get better. If you have given up, you also make no effort.”
― Edward de Bono, Teach Yourself to Think

“The military estate is the most honored. But what is war, what is needed for success in military affairs, what are the morals of military society? The aim of war is killing, the instruments of war are espionage, treason and the encouragement of it, the ruin of the inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to supply the army; deception and lying are called military stratagems; the morals of the military estate are absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, depravity, and drunkenness. And in spite of that, it is the highest estate, respected by all . . . the one who has killed the most people gets the greatest reward . . . They come together . . . to kill each other, they slaughter and maim tens of thousands of men, and then they say prayers of thanksgiving for having slaughtered so many people . . . and proclaim victory, supposing that the more people slaughtered, the greater the merit. How does God look down and listen to them! . . . Ah, dear heart, lately it has become hard for me to live. I see that I've begun to understand too much. And it's not good for man to taste of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil . . . Well, it won't be for long!”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Nu, nu, do as you must," her patient replied, as if her entire existence was but an endless series of pushbacks and rejections.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Our Country Friends

“I suppose I should feel guilty about you, Esca. For me, there has been the Eagle; but what had you to win in all this?'
Esca smiled at him, a slow, grave smile. There was a jagged tear in his forehead where a furze-root had caught him, Marcus noticed, but under it his eyes looked very quiet. 'I have been once again a free man among free men. I have shared the hunting with my brother, and it has been a good hunting.'
Marcus smiled back. 'It has been a good hunting,' he agreed.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle of the Ninth

“Strange how, after deciding to take life as one finds it, life comes fawning to one's hand.”
― Jessie Redmon Fauset, There Is Confusion

“My knowledge of the dangerous problems that were developing at the Desoto Solar Farm and my following of OSHA law were clearly inconvenient, as the company sprung a surprise resignation meeting on me!”
― Steven Magee

“Faced with a surprise resignation meeting at a remote worksite with few witnesses at the Desoto Solar Farm, I decided the best thing I could do was agree to whatever they wanted and get off site as soon as I could to protect my personal health and safety from a desperate company. I thought my life could have been at risk during the surprise meeting if I did not cooperate.”
― Steven Magee

“...he said when his mother was dying he had been certain she would not die, certain until he was not certain, and when he finally knew she was dying, was not sick but dying, he saw how much she wanted to live, until the pain took that from her, and she wanted to go, or did not want to go, but needed to go, needed to go even more than she wanted to stay, and he had not been ready for that, for his mother to need to leave, and it was a terrible thing to see.”
― Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man

“…y un día, ojalá que suficientemente lejos del último—una vez se le hace obvia la necesidad paradójica de aparear a la aceptación con la resignación—el pensador ve con regocijo cómo se transforma irremediablemente en un “sentidor”, y se entrega a la placidez que por fin lo libera.”
― Alex Jadad

“I always wondered why my coworkers disliked my resignation. It was because those that were left had to do more work!”
― Steven Magee

“The boss walks in
Papers shuffle, phone notifications
Try their best to silence.
The time now is 10:57am.
He talks to the clerk about the climate
Of work culture.

There's not enough training,
Not enough bodies filling the spaces.
She replies in agreement
Passing her work off to him.
Soon he realizes.

Phone notifications continue to go off.
A sip of coffee is taken.
The time now is 11:01 am.
He hands in his resignation
In search of a new department.

I am but a fly on the wall
Searching for a way out”
― Kewayne Wadley, The Memorandum: An Ode to The Workplace or Something like That Short Poems & Stories about the Workplace

“Rassegnazione, rassegnazione… È un punto della terra o un fazzoletto sventolato dal parapetto d’una nave?”
― Violette Leduc, La Bâtarde

“I don't want to talk about this. It's not that I think you're wrong, but it's too big for me. I'll never be able to do anything about it.”
― Samit Basu, The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport

“On the night you finally tell him, take him out to dinner. Translate the entrees for him. When you are home, lying in bed together, tell him that you are going to leave. He will look panicked, but not surprised. Perhaps he will say, Look, I don't care who else you're seeing or anything: what is your reason?

Do not attempt to bandy words. Tell him you do not love him anymore. It will make him cry, rivulets wending their way into his ears. You will start to feel sick. He will say something like: Well, you lose some, you lose some. You are supposed to laugh. Ex-hale. Blow your nose. Flick off the light. Have a sense of humor, he will whisper into the black. Have a heart.

Make him breakfast. He will want to know where you will go. Reply: To the actor. Or: To the hunchbacks. He will not eat your break-fast. He will glare at it, stir it around the plate with a fork, and then hurl it against the wall.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“Things would have turned out better if she had lived. As it was, she died when I was a kid; and though everything that's happened to me since then is thoroughly my own fault, still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“I didn't actually feel upset, that was the thing. Instead it was more like the last and worst of my root canals when the dentist had leaned in under the lamps and said almost done.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“The relief was immense. Quiet dismissal. Perfect, perfect joy of throwing it all away.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Fortune has it in for me; she is a woman, and I am not that way inclined.”
― Frederick the Great