“The red squid of passion”
“Who could imagine… that there were such vulgar monsters as death, birth, love, art and pain around the corner?… Over their gaping and sepulchral deeps he skimmed now here, now there, in his private canoe, changing his course with a flick of his paddle when death’ s black whale, or the red squid of passion, lifted for a moment its body from the brine.”
Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1977, p. 217.