How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
At the same time coffee-prices fell: where we had got a hundred pounds a ton we now got sixty or seventy. Times grew hard on the farm. (5.1.3)
Change is pretty much always a negative thing in Out of Africa. The Baroness so wishes things would just stay the same and pretty and perfect, but that just isn't how life works. A dip in the economy means really rough changes for Baroness Blixen and all the people who live on the farm.
Quote #8
A few times, Denys and I spoke as if I was really going to leave the country. He himself looked upon Africa as his home, and he understood me very well and grieved with me then, even if he laughed at my distress at parting with my people. (5.4.2)
Hmm…someone seems to be a little bit delusional. In fact, it seems to be a mass delusion, because both the Baroness and Denys are ignoring the fact that she has sold her farm and has got to get the heck out of Dodge. They only speak a few times "as if" she were going to leave the country. That's exactly what she's going to do, showing how wishful their thinking is.
Quote #9
Other things were sold out of the house, packed and sent off, so that the house, in the course of these months, became das Ding an sich, noble like a skull, a cool and roomy place to dwell in, with an echo to it, and the grass of the lawn growing long up to the doorstep.
The house starts to change from an active and lively meeting place into a shell. Dinesen borrows a phrase from the philosopher Kant, das Ding an sich, meaning "the-thing-in-itself" to describe the house. Rather than being a particular house it is like an example of all houses. The changes have brought it from the realm of real life into the abstract.