So here goes:

1. Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of the road in northern Wisconsin. [Leviathan by Paul Auster]
2. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain [Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, guessed by Christy]
3. Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his. [Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, guessed by Sharon]
4. I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice–not because of his voice, of because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God… [A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, guessed by Sharon and Brian]
5. All this happened, more or less. [Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, guessed Christy]
6. The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm. [Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, guessed by Betty]
7. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Bundía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. [One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez]
8. It is only ten miles beyond the city that the river loses its momentum, drooling into the brackish estuary that feeds Iron Bay. [The Scar by China Miéville]
9. For legal reasons, I have had to alter a number of facts in this book. [Operation Shylock by Philip Roth]
10. Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, guessed by pretty much everybody]