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Kissing could have begun as a way of sniffing out who's who. From a whiff to a kiss was just a short trip across the face.

All across Africa, the Pacific and the Americas, we find cultures that didn't know about mouth kissing until their first contact with European explorers. And the attraction was not always immediately apparent. Most considered the act of exchanging saliva revolting.

The first kiss between two people is something really good in life.

There are two possibilities: Either the kiss is a human universal, one of the constellation of innate traits, including language and laughter, that unites us as a species, or it is an invention, like fire or wearing clothes, an idea so good that it was bound to metastasize across the globe.

What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?

Kissing is not just kissing. It is a major escalation or de-escalation point in a powerful process of mate choice.

I know one man who was impotent who gave AIDS to his wife and the only thing they did was kiss.

A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.

My very first kiss happened when I was 6, underneath some desks during 'nap time', but my first real kiss happened when I was 15 in the parking lot at a Mexican food restaurant.