The American Mall Quotes & Sayings

She was in the middle of a city [Nominally a city. It was the size of an English county town, or, translated into American terms, a shopping mall.] at the time. — Terry Pratchett

It is hard to realize today that "government" during the American Civil War a hundred years ago meant the merest handful of people. Lincoln's Secretary of War had fewer than fifty civilian subordinates, most of them not "executives" and policy-makers but telegraph clerks. The entire Washington establishment of the U.S. government in Theodore Roosevelt's time, around 1900, could be comfortably housed in any one of the government buildings along the Mall today. — Peter F. Drucker

The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, actually, was an effort to put something on the mall in Washington so American tourists could walk through America, and in their minds everything on the mall would be American. — Bernice Johnson Reagon

Suggested they try the Glatt, an enormous American-style mall in Wallisellen, one town over from Dietlikon. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

The majority of American writers today have chosen passive non-resistance to things as they are, producing sloughs of poetry about their personal angst and anomie, cascades of short stories and rivers of novels obsessed with the nuances of domestic relationships - suburban hanky-panky - chic boutique shopping mall literary soap opera. When they do speak out on matters of controversy they attack not the evils of our time but fellow writers who may insist on complaining. — Edward Abbey

And don't think that by eating freedom fries you are being patriotic and helping the war effort. Use less gasoline, read a newspaper. You know what, how about we cool it with the freedom fries anyway you fat asses. We're the fattest country in the world. Have you ever walked around an American mall? It's nothing but chick fillets and Lane Bryant track suits busting at the seams. — Tina Fey

When it comes to dressing well, American culture is so self-fulfilled that it has not only disregarded this courtesy of self-presentation, but has turned that disregard into a virtue. We are too superior/busy/cool/not-uptight to bother about how we look to other people, and so we can wear pajamas to school and underwear to the mall. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I expected to be happy, but let me tell you something. Anticipating happiness and being happy are two entirely different things. I told myself that all I wanted to do was go to the mall. I wanted to look at the pretty girls, ogle the Victoria's Secret billboards, and hit on girls at the Sam Goody record store. I wanted to sit in the food court and gorge on junk food. I wanted to go to Bath and Body Works, stand in the middle of the store, and breathe. I wanted to stand there with my eyes closed and just smell, man. I wanted to lose myself in the total capitalism and consumerism of it all, the pure greediness, the pure indulgence, the pure American-ness of it all. I never made it that far. I didn't even make it out of the airport in Baltimore with all its Cinnabons, Starbucks, Brooks Brothers, and Brookstones before realizing that after where we'd been, after what we'd seen, home would never be home again. — Matthew J. Hefti

First of all, "no self" doesn't mean there is no self, haha. So the "no problem" is jumped at a little too fast I'm afraid. Especially in American culture where people tend to be materialistic philosophically. I don't mean running to the mall, but philosophically, you see? — Robert Thurman