Daily Inspiration Quote by Nelson Gidding

The real monster here is social vacancy: the cold click of a door closing, the party that continues without you, the phone that does not ring. Nelson Gidding’s line is a neat inversion of the classic fear script. “Things that go bump in the night” is a stock phrase from childhood and genre fiction, a campfire cliché meant to summon external threats. Gidding swaps it for something less theatrical and more humiliating: being “left alone or left out.” The move isn’t just rhetorical; it’s a diagnosis of how dread matures. As we age, the supernatural gets demoted, and the social becomes existential.

The repetition of “left” is doing heavy lifting. It suggests passivity, the particular sting of not choosing solitude but having it assigned to you. “Left alone” implies abandonment; “left out” implies exclusion, a quieter cruelty that can happen in a crowded room. Pairing them turns loneliness into a two-front war: the absence of people and the presence of people who don’t make space for you.

As a dramatist, Gidding knows that fear is most legible when it can be staged. Ghosts are easy props; alienation is the harder, truer suspense, because it’s interpersonal and therefore plausible. The intent feels less like confession than like craft advice disguised as a personal truth: if you want tension that lands, don’t reach for the dark hallway. Put a character near the light, and deny them belonging.