The Notebool Pdf

THE
NOTEBOOK
i THE NOTEBOOK
Nicholas Sparks
VVNER BOOKS
A Time Warner Company
ii
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places
and incidents are either
the product of the author's imagination or are used
fictitiously, and any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is
entirely coincidental.
Copyright ©1996 by Nicholas Sparks All rights reserved.Warner Books, Inc., 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York,
NY 10020
A
Time Warner Company
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing: October 1996
10 9 8 7 6 $ 4 3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sparks, Nicholas.
The notebook / Nicholas Sparks.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-446-52080-2
1. Man-woman relatinnships--North Carolina--Fiction. 2.
Oral reading--Fiction. 3.Aged--Fiction. I. Title. PS3569.P363N68 1996
813'.54--dc2096-33815CIP
Book design and composition by L & G McRee
iii This book is dedicated with love to Cathy, my wife and
my friend.
iv Acknowledgments
This story is what it is today because of two special
people, and I would like to
thank them for everything they've done.
To Theresa Park, the agent who plucked me from obscurity.
Thankyou for your kin&ess,

your patience, and the many hours you have spent working
with me. I will be forever
grateful for everything you've done.
To Jamie Raab, my editor. Thank you for your wisdom, your
humor, and your good-hearted
nature. You made this a wonderful experience for me, and
I'm glad to call you my
friend.
v THE NOTEBOOK
1 Who am I? And how, I wonder, will this story end?The sun has come up and I am sitting by a window that is
foggy with the breath of
a life,,,. gone by. I'm a sight this morning: two shirts,
heavy pants, a scarf wrapped twice around my neck and
tucked into a thick sweater
knitted by my daughter thirty birthdays ago. The
thermostat in my room is set as
high as it will go, and a smaller space heater sits
directly behind me. It clicks
andgroans and spews hot air like a fairy-tale dragon, and
still my body shivers
with a cold that will never go away, a cold that has been
eighty years in the making.
Eighty years, I think sometimes, and despite my own
acceptance of my age, it still
amazes me that I haven't been warm since George Bush was
president.
2
I wonder if this is how it is for everyone my age.
My life? It isn't easy toexplain. It has not been the
rip-roaring spectacular I
fancied it would be, but neither have I burrowed around
with the gophers. I suppose
it has most resembled a blue-chip stock: fairly stable,
more ups than downs, and
gradually trending upward over time. A good buy, a lucky
buy, and I've learned that
not everyone can say this about his life. But do not be
misled. I am nothing special;of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts,
and I've led a common
life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name
will soon be forgotten,

but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to
me, this has always been
enough.
The romantics would call this a love story, the cynics
would call it a tragedy. In
my mind it's a little bit of both, and no matter howyou
choose to view it in the
end, it does not change the fact that it involves a great
deal of my life and the
path I've chosen to follow. I have no complaints about my
path and the places it
has taken me; enough complaints to fill a circus tent
about other things, maybe,
but the path I've chosen has always been the right one,
and I wouldn't have had it
any other way.
Time,unfortunately, doesn't make it easy to stay on
course. The path is straight
as ever, but now it is strewn with the rocks and gravel
that
3
accumulate over a lifetime. Until three years ago it would
have been easy to ignore,
but it's impossible now. There is a sickness rolling
through my body; I'm neither
strong nor healthy, and my days are spent like an old
party balloon: listless, spongy,
and...