3
" The car was on the FDR drive now and, turning her head, she glanced out at the bleak brown buildings of the projects that stretched for blocks along the drive. Something inside her sank at the sight of all that sameness, and she suddenly felt defeated.
She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. In the past year, she'd started experiencing these moments of desperate emptiness, as if nothing really mattered, nothing was ever going to change, there was nothing new; and she could see her life stretching before her--one endless long day after the next, in which every day was essentially the same. Meanwhile, time was marching on, and all that was happening to her was that she was getting older and smaller, and one day she would be no bigger than a dot, and then she would simply disappear. Poof! Like a small leaf burned up under a magnifying glass in the sun. These feelings were shocking to her, because she'd never experienced world-weariness before. She'd never had time. All her life, she'd been striving and striving to become this thing that was herself--the entity that was Nico O'Neilly. And then, one morning, time had caught up with her and she had woken up and realized that she was there. She had arrived at her destination, and she had everything she'd worked so hard for: a stunning career, a loving (well, sort of) husband, whom she respected, and a beautiful eleven-year-old daughter whom she adored.
She should have been thrilled. But instead, she felt tired. Like all those things belonged to someone else. "
― Candace Bushnell , Lipstick Jungle
16
" booth and called her best friend from F.I.T., Kit Callendar. “She said she wanted to start me off small, but she took eighteen pieces!” Victory exclaimed. The order seemed enormous to both of them, and at that moment, she couldn’t have ever imagined that someday she’d get orders for ten thousand… Three more weeks of sewing late into the night completed her first order, and she showed up at Myrna’s office with the pieces in three supermarket shopping bags. “What are you doing here?” Myrna demanded. “I have your things,” Victory said proudly. “Don’t you have a shipper?” Myrna asked, aghast. “What am I supposed to do with these bags?” Victory smiled at the memory. She’d known nothing about the technical aspects of being a designer back then; had no idea that there were cutting and sewing rooms where real designers had their clothing made. But ambition and burning desire (the kind of desire, she imagined, most women had for men) carried her forward. And then she got a check in the mail for five hundred dollars. All the pieces had sold. She was eighteen years old, and she was in business. All through her twenties, she just kept going. She and Kit moved into a tiny two-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side, on a street that was filled with Indian restaurants and basement “candy stores” where drugs were sold. They would cut and sew until they couldn’t see anymore, and then they "
― Candace Bushnell , Lipstick Jungle