she talked less, or at least did less of the kind of talking whose only purpose was to fill silence

I get tired of talking when I want to be silent.

"Sometimes I go for days without speaking to a soul. I think, “I should make that call", but I put it off. Because there’s something pleasurable about not talking. But then I love talking, so it’s not that. But sometimes it can be nice. It’s not like I sit here philosophizing, because I’ve no talent for that. It’s just this thing about silence that’s so wonderful.

Why couldn't she stop talking? Did all lonely people have that problem?

But Why Does She Not Speak?

She does not talk anymore, the one who used to talk so pleasantly.

Why do you talk all the time?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question, but she cocked her head on one side and considered it carefully.
“I think it’s ’cause I don’t know any big words, like you and Mummy,” she said, just in time to pull me out of my magazine again, “so I have to use lots and lots of little ones.

My wife has a slight impediment in her speech. Every now and then she stops to breathe.

Women talk when they want to. Or don't.

Hardly have I finished speaking the words, and she vanishes, the way that people sometimes do, even from our minds.

And then she was tired of talk again, tired of its uselessness. It had never been any more than it was now: whispers against the great roar of the world, half-heard and less understood.

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

It's good to shut up sometimes.

Her fluency was marvelous. She would say things at random, intricate, flamelike, or slide off into a parenthetical limbo peppered with fireworks — admirable linguistic feats which a practiced writer might struggle for hours to achieve.