Writing style

I confess that I sometimes found Murdoch's writing style too densely detailed (mainly too concerned with physical description), and, thus, somewhat slow-moving, but I also found some real gems of phrasing and sheer observation.

Sometimes comic:
To Dave's pupils the world is a mystery; a mystery to which it should be reasonably possible to discover a key. The key would be something of the sort that could be contained in a book of some eight hundred pages. To find the key would not necessarily be a simple matter, but Dave's pupils feel sure that the dedication of between four and ten hours a week, excluding university vacations, should suffice to find it.

Hehe

Sometimes poignant:
As for her ambiguous dismissal of me, I was used to this. Most of the women I know behave in this way, and I have become accustomed to asking no questions, and even to thinking no questions. We all live in the interstices of each other's lives, and we would all get a surprise if we could see everything.

That is just brilliant to me. We all live in the interstices of each other's lives.

How strangely it excites people to see their dogs swimming!

Indeed, it does. Without fail! (I heartily enjoyed the way she portrayed Mars and Jake's fondness for him).

"Some situations can't be unravelled," said Hugo, "they just have to be dropped. The trouble with you, Jake, is that you want to understand everything sympathetically. It can't be done. One must just blunder on. Truth lies in blundering on."

That's when I saw Hugo's real genius.

And sometimes poetic:
Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent forever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, life itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future. So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came."

Gorgeous.