"elusive state" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to describe anyone or anything that is difficult to locate or pin down, or that is hard to bring about. For example: "She has been striving for years to reach her elusive state of contentment."
A strategy dependent on being in the elusive state sportsmen call "the zone" is hardly a recipe for success.
The goal is to strive for balance, that elusive state of being that we're all supposed to seek.
Still, as most of us learn when we move toward that shifting and elusive state called adulthood, the political and the personal can never be unequivocally separated.
The lizard-woman Catareen calls this elusive state of grace "stroth", but it's what all of Cunningham's characters, including his celebrated reinvention of Virginia Woolf, are seeking.
However, the good news is that making even the smallest adjustments can help us attain that elusive state we all aspire to.
In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks.
Mr. Desplechin seems to have an uncanny feel for visualizing complicated, elusive states of mind.
More often, however, the characters sense but cannot label their wounds – Tsiolkas is expert at evoking brutal but often elusive states of rage, grief and bewilderment, and, crucially, at making you wonder where their roots really lie.
Conflict-directed learning is ubiquitous in constraint satisfaction problems like SAT, but has been elusive for state space search on reachability problems like classical planning.
Femtosecond laser pulses help to take a snapshot of the huge elusive Efimov state [Also see Report by Kunitski et al.].
This last scene leaves an indelible mark on us since it captures the essence of the human spirit -- that impulse to recapture what is fleeting, which marks the beginning of our searching, the irrepressible yearning to be reinstated in that elusive blissful state of love.
