All 50 Uses of

utter
in
Atlas Shrugged

It was the one sentence which, she felt sure, he had never uttered before; a man could not reverse himself so late in life.†
Chpt 1.4

uttered = said (or make a sound) with the voice

The unuttered words in his mind were: The damn little fool means it.†
Chpt 1.9

unuttered = not said

standard prefix: The prefix "un-" in unuttered means not and reverses the meaning of uttered. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.

The unnamed and the unuttered could not clash into a contradiction.†
Chpt 1.9

-I thought their real motive for inviting me was their appreciation of the Metal, and—" She smiled in the brief space of his pause; she knew the sentence he had stopped himself from uttering: " and for that, I would forgive anyone anything."†
Chpt 1.9

uttering = saying (or making a sound) with the voice

Then I wouldn't know what to say," he answered-and felt a rush of blood to his brain, tight as a slap, realizing suddenly the double infamy of a lie uttered in protestation of honesty; he had said it sincerely, but it implied a boast to which he had no right any longer.†
Chpt 1.10

uttered = said (or make a sound) with the voice

It sounded like some sort of monstrous corruption that precluded the possibility of wondering whether anyone could mean it; he wondered only what was the point of uttering it.†
Chpt 1.10 *

uttering = saying (or making a sound) with the voice

The cry she uttered was one she had never permitted herself before, because she made it her pride always to answer it herself-but she saw a man standing a few steps away, she did not see that he was a ragged bum, and she uttered the cry because it was the plea of reason and he was a human figure: "What are we going to do?"†
Chpt 1.10

uttered = said (or make a sound) with the voice

The cry she uttered was one she had never permitted herself before, because she made it her pride always to answer it herself-but she saw a man standing a few steps away, she did not see that he was a ragged bum, and she uttered the cry because it was the plea of reason and he was a human figure: "What are we going to do?"†
Chpt 1.10

Dr. Stadler could have regarded the sentence as conceivable, had it been uttered with hatred, envy or malice; but the absence of any such emotion, the casual ease of the voice, an ease suggesting a chuckle, hit him like a moment's glimpse of a realm that could not be taken as part of reality; the thing spreading down to his stomach was cold terror.†
Chpt 2.1

He knew the words which he had not uttered.†
Chpt 2.1

She had ordered him out of her office, and had sat in incredulous horror before the fact that the most vicious statement she had ever heard had been uttered in a tone of moral righteousness.†
Chpt 2.1

He uttered nothing but uncertain opinions about physical nature-and nothing but categorical imperatives about men.†
Chpt 2.1

Dagny-he thought desperately-Dagny, who had never said a word about his life at home, who had never made a claim, uttered a reproach or asked a question-he could not appear before her with his wife, he could not let her see him as the husband being proudly shown off-he wished he could die now, in this moment, before he committed this action-because he knew that he would commit it.†
Chpt 2.2

If you can refute a single sentence I uttered, madame, I shall hear it gratefully.†
Chpt 2.2

The movement suggested a strict formality, the denial of any attempt at presumption-but it stressed the intimacy of the fact that he uttered no word of greeting or explanation.†
Chpt 2.3

She whispered, "AH right, Hank, I won't thank you," the tone of her voice and the look of her eyes making it a lie by the time it was uttered.†
Chpt 2.4

The sentence sounded involuntary, as if, trying to suppress the sound of emotion, he had uttered suppressed words.†
Chpt 2.4

He had been considered profound for uttering such things as: "Freedom?†
Chpt 2.7

uttering = saying (or making a sound) with the voice

She thought suddenly of those modern college-infected parasites who assumed a sickening air of moral self-righteousness whenever they uttered the standard bromides about their concern for the welfare of others.†
Chpt 2.10

uttered = said (or make a sound) with the voice

"The secret of transforming energy—" she began, and stopped, "I could tell it to you in fifteen minutes," he said, in answer to the desperate plea she had not uttered, "but there's no power on earth that can force me to tell it.†
Chpt 3.1

"That is what I want to do—" she answered, and stopped before she uttered the rest of the answer in her mind: more than anything else in the world.†
Chpt 3.2

He listened, as if it were irrelevant, and then he uttered the thing from which he had to recover, "But we thought you were dead."†
Chpt 3.2

But there was another, uglier dread: the sordid shape of self-sacrifice, the suspicion, not to be uttered about him, that he wished to remove himself from her path and let its emptiness force her back to the man who was his best-loved friend.†
Chpt 3.2

It was an experience she had not known since childhood —the experience of being held for three hours by a play that told a story she had not seen before, in lines she had not heard, uttering a theme that had not been picked from the hand-me-downs of the centuries.†
Chpt 3.2

uttering = saying (or making a sound) with the voice

They walked in silence, but the sound of their steps, blending into a single, steady beat, was like a speech to be grasped and not to be uttered in any other form.†
Chpt 3.2

uttered = said (or make a sound) with the voice

She was about to speak, but knew that she couldn't, even if he had permitted it, she caught her unuttered words, the movement of her lips was her only answer, then she inclined her head in acceptance.†
Chpt 3.3

unuttered = not said

standard prefix: The prefix "un-" in unuttered means not and reverses the meaning of uttered. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.

He was looking straight at her and she saw a brief sparkle in his eyes, which was not a smile, but almost as if he had heard the cry she had not uttered.†
Chpt 3.3

uttered = said (or make a sound) with the voice

Your friends in Washington never uttered a word about it.†
Chpt 3.4

He seemed eager to display her in the best drawing rooms of the city, and he never uttered a word of reproach for her ignorance, for her awkwardness, for those terrible moments when a silent exchange of glances among the guests and a burst of blood to her cheekbones told her that she had said the wrong thing again.†
Chpt 3.4

She looked as if nothing could reach her, because her dying words had been uttered.†
Chpt 3.4

There was no reason to feel more revulsion than usual, she thought; he had merely uttered the things which were preached, heard and accepted everywhere; but this creed was usually expounded in the third person, and Jim had had the open effrontery to expound it in the first.†
Chpt 3.5

At a time when the voices of railroad officials uttered nothing but sounds designed to avoid communication, the voices of nameless men were her last link to the system, the last sparks of reason and tortured honesty flashing briefly through the miles of Taggart track.†
Chpt 3.5

She went from railroad executives to wealthy shippers to Washington officials and back to the railroad-by cab, by phone, by wire-pursuing a trail of half-uttered hints.†
Chpt 3.5

It was strange, she thought, to obtain news by means of nothing but denials, as if existence had ceased, facts had vanished and only the frantic negatives uttered by officials and columnists gave any clue to the reality they were denying.†
Chpt 3.7

Dropping below the level of a savage, who believes that the magic words he utters have the power to alter reality, they believe that reality can be altered by the power of the words they do not utter-and their magic tool is the blank-out, the pretense that nothing can come into existence past the voodoo of their refusal to identify it.†
Chpt 3.7

utters = says (or makes a sound) with the voice

'We know that we know nothing,' they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are claiming knowledge—'There are no absolutes,' they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are uttering an absolute—'You cannot prove that you exist or that you're conscious,' they chatter, blanking out the fact that proof presupposes existence, consciousness and a complex chain of knowledge: the existence of something to know, of a consciousness able to know it, and of a knowledge that has learned to distinguish between such concepts as the proved and the unproved.†
Chpt 3.7

uttering = saying (or making a sound) with the voice

"When a savage who has not learned to speak declares that existence must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of nonexistence-when he declares that your consciousness must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of unconsciousness-he is asking you to step into a void outside of existence and consciousness to give him proof of both-he is asking you to become a zero gaining knowledge about a zero, "When he declares that an axiom is a matter of arbitrary choice and he doesn't choose to accept the axiom that he exists, he blanks out the fact that he has accepted it by uttering that sentence, that the only way to reject it is to shut one's mouth, expound no theories and die.†
Chpt 3.7

She had called a meeting of the Terminal track laborers for the alleged purpose of boosting their morale, she had held the meeting twice, to face all the men in turn-she had repeated the same unintelligible speech, feeling a stab of shame at the empty generalities she uttered and, together, a stab of pride that it did not matter to her any longer-she had looked at the exhausted, brutalized faces of men who did not care whether they were ordered to work or to listen to meaningless sounds.†
Chpt 3.8

uttered = said (or make a sound) with the voice

It had been easy to watch Mr. Thompson's gulping smiles and his repeated cries of "That's my girl!" uttered with glances of triumph at his assistants, the triumph of a man whose judgment in trusting her had been vindicated.†
Chpt 3.8

The sentence Rearden had uttered was: "She will probably try to take the shirt off my back with the freight rates she's going to charge, but— I'll be able to meet them."†
Chpt 3.10

But today at the mills, we poured—" He stopped; he did not know what made him unable to utter the one thing he had come home to say; he added only, "It's just that I ....forgot."†
Chpt 1.2

He wanted to utter an angry denial, but she was smiling at him as if this were merely a conversational joke, and he had no capacity for the sort of conversations which were not supposed to be meant, so he did not answer.†
Chpt 1.2

It would be so easy to squash Philip by returning the insult, he thought-by returning an insult which would be deadly because it would be true-that he could not bring himself to utter it.†
Chpt 1.2

He looked at her; his face assumed the satisfaction of a person about to utter something that has the power to hurt.†
Chpt 1.3 *

But the feeling was the product of a thought he would not utter.†
Chpt 1.9

She did not want to utter a single unnecessary word; but she could not stop herself: she kept seeing the figure of the old charwoman scrubbing the steps.†
Chpt 1.10

"How did you get here?" was the first thing James Taggart found himself able to utter.†
Chpt 2.2

If you think it's proper to utter such—†
Chpt 2.2

The secretary smiled with sudden animation, as if she were about to utter an enthusiastic compliment, but the smile vanished abruptly.†
Chpt 2.3

Through his sleepless night, then through the taut concentration on the duties of the day, his answer to the message had kept beating in his mind, the answer he would never have a chance to utter.†
Chpt 2.3

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Grouped by 2 Meanings

Definitions:

(1) (utter as in: utter stupidity)
complete or total (used as an intensifier--typically when stressing how bad something is)
(2) (utter as in: utter a complaint)
say something or make a sound with the voice
(3) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
meaning too rare to warrant focus:

Less commonly, and archaically, utter can mean to let out.

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utter in Atlas Shrugged

utter
in
Atlas Shrugged