toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

elusive
in a sentence

show 189 more with this conextual meaning
  • More than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter of love.   (source)
    elusive = hard to find (difficult to get a hold of)
  • He says he was trying to remember a Tchaikovsky piece he once knew quite well, but now it is as elusive as the meaning of a dream.   (source)
    elusive = difficult to get a hold of
  • I fear this monster may be more elusive.   (source)
  • Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old,   (source)
  • In defense, the rabbit becomes sly and frightened and elusive and he digs holes and hides when the wolf is about.   (source)
    elusive = difficult to catch
  • I started to smell something. It was rich and sweet, delicious, and elusive. Automatically, I inhaled deeply, still trying to concentrate on...   (source)
    elusive = difficult to get a hold of
  • sniffing to catch an elusive scent   (source)
    elusive = hard to detect
  • ...and after days and nights of discussion, chasing this elusive hope or that, ...   (source)
    elusive = unachievable
  • his elusive friend Jason Bourne   (source)
    elusive = hard to find (difficult to get a hold of)
  • I suppose if I were to try to stick a pin through that most elusive spot "the happiest days of my life," that strange winter on the Portia Sue with my father would have to be indicated.   (source)
    elusive = difficult to identify
  • So you're going to marry the elusive and powerful Roarke.   (source)
    elusive = difficult to capture
  • Everything was so pleasant that my thoughts just floated, light and elusive, in my head.   (source)
    elusive = difficult to get a hold of
  • the mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel had proved elusive once more;   (source)
    elusive = difficult to capture
  • ...the longed-for white heron was elusive,   (source)
    elusive = difficult to get a hold of
  • But on cloudy days, when the sun was elusive, the compass would guide her.†   (source)
  • Sleep was elusive.†   (source)
  • Roman, Andrew, and I stay up well past midnight, trying to make sense of McCandless's life and death, yet his essence remains slippery, vague, elusive.†   (source)
  • I wondered if this was the scheme Winifred herself had been following when she'd bagged the elusive Mr. Prior.†   (source)
  • Once the ham was purchased, my father and I rode home, sharing the excitement felt by cavemen who had successfully hunted the elusive mammoth.†   (source)
  • An elusive, yet familiar element ….†   (source)
  • The answer is elusive.†   (source)
  • And so, in that Greek letter that looks like a shack with a corrugated tin roof, in that elusive, irrational number with which scientists try to understand the universe, I found refuge.†   (source)
  • Robert Langdon had proven an elusive quarry tonight, and with Agent Neveu now helping him, he might be far harder to corner than expected.†   (source)
  • The elusive Dorian boy, I presume.†   (source)
  • But the answer remained maddeningly elusive.†   (source)
  • She was elusive.†   (source)
  • "That's right, Smith, he is," muttered Harry, grinning to him-self, as he dived amongst the Chasers with his eyes searching all around for some hint of the elusive Snitch.†   (source)
  • Its very features seemed elusive, seemed to promise a meaning, or even a truth, that was more complex and interesting than anything you had ever before imagined.†   (source)
  • Most mechanically, Owen helped my reading by another means: he determined that my eyes wandered to both the left and to the right of where I was in a sentence, and that—instead of following the elusive next word with my finger—I should highlight a spot on the page by reading through a hole cut in a piece of paper.†   (source)
  • Briony resisted because she wanted to chase in solitude the faint thrill of possibility she had felt before, the elusive excitement at a prospect she was coming close to defining, at least emotionally.†   (source)
  • She wants to help Vivian find some kind of peace, elusive and fleeting as it may be.†   (source)
  • Researchers raced to find what they believed to be the elusive cancer virus, with hopes of developing a vaccine to prevent it.†   (source)
  • Now it was an even slower process as I agonized over the perfect word, the precise rhyme scheme, the most playful image, and the most ineffable analog to the most elusive emotion.†   (source)
  • But he was always elusive.†   (source)
  • He could still charm them and commiserate over their inability to locate the elusive deedholder, H. S. Campbell, but Holmes knew they soon would lose patience and in fact was a bit surprised they had not pursued him more forcefully than had been the case thus far.†   (source)
  • It is the ultimate consumer technology, designed to manufacture not a tangible product, but something much more elusive: a brief sense of hope.†   (source)
  • In knowing that the answers may be elusive, but they could be found.†   (source)
  • I sent clerks into their fabric books and pattern books to search for elusive designs.†   (source)
  • I try desperately to make sense of an elusive fragment of memory.†   (source)
  • Florentino Ariza, because he was so quiet and elusive, also earned the esteem of the owner, and during the most arduous period of his grief he would lock himself in the suffocating little rooms to read verses and tearful serialized love stories, and his reveries left nests of dark swallows on the balconies and the sound of kisses and the beating of wings in the stillness of siesta.†   (source)
  • The elusive something that had been bothering me for days, the important connection that I couldn't quite put together, suddenly became clear.†   (source)
  • And the more I try to fathom what makes me enjoy mechanical work and them hate it so, the more elusive it becomes.†   (source)
  • One was so elusive we only ever saw his high-school-aged helper; another was so old I was convinced he could no longer tell a Chihuahua from a cat.†   (source)
  • Eragon thought of Tenga alone, in the ruined elf outpost of Edur Ithindra, hunched over his precious hoard of tomes, searching, always searching, for his elusive "answer."†   (source)
  • But there was still something elusive about Alex Cormier, something she couldn't put her finger on-something that wasn't quite right.†   (source)
  • I had finally found that elusive something more.†   (source)
  • Elusive as they are, they are the only weapon the Scholars have.†   (source)
  • When he occasionally got hung up searching for an elusive word or phrase, Bien would lower his chin, place his open palm on the crown of his head, and rotate it in small quick circles, the same motion, I learned later, that Generose had used to soothe him when he cried as a child.†   (source)
  • Something that shimmered, something elusive.†   (source)
  • Gordon is a Maven — a Maven for the elusive, indefinable quality known as cool.†   (source)
  • It is a powerful—if limited—tool that uses statistical techniques to identify otherwise elusive correlations.†   (source)
  • In Danbury I had learned to hasten the days by chasing the enjoyment in them, no matter how elusive.†   (source)
  • Missile submarines were supposed to be elusive, and it would not have surprised the old admiral at all if Ramius were twisting a few tails.†   (source)
  • Its taller and more elusive neighbor twenty kilometers to the northeast became K2 by default, based on the later date of its "discovery."†   (source)
  • A few seconds later the guitarist-the elusive Ted-came out the revolving doors, looking irritated.†   (source)
  • Of all the six, I find him the most complex, the most elusive study in contrasts.†   (source)
  • They were in many ways as elusive as the dreams of mortals.†   (source)
  • Through this correspondence, which Nfvea violated with impunity at regular intervals, she learned about the hazards of a miner's life, always dreading avalanches, pursuing elusive veins, asking for credit against good luck that was still to come, and trusting that someday he would strike a marvelous seam of gold that would allow him to become a rich man overnight and return to lead Rosa by the arm to the altar, thus becoming the happiest man in the universe, as he always wrote at the…†   (source)
  • All of which left one young man, still searching for the elusive unseen-a place, he now says, "where I won't live in two worlds, but one"-feeling a surge of very reasonable faith.†   (source)
  • To the White House, where at this very moment the president and his government were running on fumes, trying to put out a thousand fires and turn over a thousand stones, desperate to head off disaster and find that elusive solution.†   (source)
  • The stability he sought proved elusive again as he left that job to be a barman in a nightclub.†   (source)
  • The real thing remained elusive.†   (source)
  • The name Zala had come up on four occasions in the material that Mia had gathered over the last two years, but always on the periphery, always eerily elusive.†   (source)
  • From outside I could hear her going through various drawers, searching for the elusive map.†   (source)
  • Even when acceptance is achieved and a degree of happiness attained, joy often remains elusive forever, like a promise of water in a dry well once brimming but now holding only the deep, damp smell of past sustenance.†   (source)
  • It is silent and elusive, refusing to be dammed and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the consciousness at ragged, unexpected intervals.†   (source)
  • Her elusiveness and indifference to established habits of behavior reminded him of his mother, who was as stubborn in her pursuits of the occult as the women of Greater Saint Matthew's were in the search for redeeming grace.†   (source)
  • The plane was circling slowly, dipping down, then rising again, struggling-she thought-as she had struggled, to distinguish the sight of a wreck in a hopeless spread of crevices and boulders, an elusive spread neither clear enough to abandon nor to survey.†   (source)
  • As if the timelessness of the ancestor world and the unborn have joined spirits to wring an issue of the elusive being of passage ….†   (source)
  • It did not take a grand creative leap on my part to speculate that the organization of which he spoke was the elusive Ten.†   (source)
  • She's as pale as a sliver of moon, as elusive as truth.†   (source)
  • Far off, Old Tom rang seven o'clock while Max jostled the bed, searched beneath it, and flung blankets about in a desperate quest for David's elusive door.†   (source)
  • Perhaps he had no reason anymore for falling or rising, and would do better on the hillside-if not at the crest, then at least high enough to view the beautiful things that are so elusive up close.†   (source)
  • Before Lord Stannis had knighted him, he had been the most notorious and elusive smuggler in all the Seven Kingdoms.†   (source)
  • I've found the rarest of rare—Lilly Pulitzer's elusive tiger-print housedress…with matching kerchief.†   (source)
  • He understood the source of his recollections now, though their exact details remained elusive.†   (source)
  • The meaning of his life was an elusive seam of water hundreds of feet below the surface, and he would periodically drop a bucket down the well, fill it, bring it up and drink from it.†   (source)
  • He came to Nahalal on two other occasions, both times accompanied by the wispy-haired man with an elusive face.†   (source)
  • Theresa could traipse all over, searching out that elusive brother of hers; Helen walked as little and as lightly as she could, sparing her shoes, that they might last until the Nationalists saved the country and she could go home again.†   (source)
  • He had a vague idea that something of great but elusive importance had happened, and wondered if he should 3iscuss it with Rashaverak.†   (source)
  • Besides, even as I set these reservations down, I sense an urgency, an elusive meaning in this experience and its desperate eroticism by which at least there may be significant things to be said about that sexually bedeviled era.†   (source)
  • She tiptoed her mind around the whole subject and back to an elusive thing that peeped out and then withdrew.†   (source)
  • It struck one immediately that there was something odd about him, some definite quirk that set him apart from ordinary humanity--some elusive quality or singular madness which, once found out, would make everything about him clear.†   (source)
  • Would he ever remember that elusive thing about it or be sure what it might really be a symbol of?†   (source)
  • The elusive rain shuts off suddenly, like the storm did last year in the arena.   (source)
    elusive = difficult to get
  • It may be elusive or hidden. People may wish to disregard it. But there is such a thing as truth   (source)
    elusive = difficult to get a hold of
  • Half a dozen men in long cloaks stood silent and watchful, gazing as ever at houses eleven and thirteen, but the thing for which they were waiting still appeared elusive.   (source)
    elusive = difficult to find and get a hold of
  • As long as Buttercup feels he has the chance of catching the elusive light under his paws, he's bristling with aggression.   (source)
    elusive = difficult to catch
  • She hoped for Ben's sake that he would also come to remember him that way, without guilt and with the certain knowledge of Keith's love for him, so elusive in his life to that point.   (source)
    elusive = difficult to get
  • The most elusive killer in modern history, a man many of us truly believe has been responsible-in one way or another-for the most tragic assassinations of our time.   (source)
    elusive = evasive (difficult to get a hold of)
  • In Swansboro, Officer Jennifer Romanello spent the evening learning what she could about the elusive Robert Bonham.   (source)
    elusive = difficult to get a hold of
  • an elusive animal
  • What are these elusive and ephemeral things that ignite passion in the human heart?   (source)
  • an elusive award
  • an elusive memory
  • From tree to tree he limps, elusive, white, a rumour.†   (source)
  • If we could identify the elusive "Commander," we felt, at least some progress would have been made.†   (source)
  • Sleep became elusive, a common symptom of minor altitude illness.†   (source)
  • What had been elusive about Howard Dunlop was now pinned down.†   (source)
  • On Whirl we stalked the elusive zeplen through their cloud towers.†   (source)
  • Can that possible be the voice of the elusive Mr. Potter?†   (source)
  • Cats ran on autopilot, and this cat in particular was shy and elusive, especially around Marley.†   (source)
  • Blamed on bad shellfish, elusive viruses, or an overlooked weakness in the aorta.†   (source)
  • In the shadows of the barnyard, she seemed as lovely and elusive as a wraith.†   (source)
  • I broke into a weaving run, hoping I'd make an elusive target for someone firing at my back.†   (source)
  • And now let's move to news concerning the wizard who is proving just as elusive as Harry Potter.†   (source)
  • Something tugged at my memory, elusive, on the edges.†   (source)
  • Wild things are elusive and wily and look out for themselves.†   (source)
  • Alistair just felt an elusive pull toward whatever he was seeking.†   (source)
  • From somewhere within him he had to summon the elusive past and trust unremembered instincts.†   (source)
  • At sixteen, the elusive stamp of hurt was already marked clearly in her eyes.†   (source)
  • I've tried to seek out Helene and end this quickly, but she's elusive.†   (source)
  • It was an elusive memory—numbing glimpses of wild, rampant violence.†   (source)
  • As I searched for the elusive answer, the more guilty I began to feel.†   (source)
  • Then she steals a look out the window, hoping to glimpse the elusive girl.†   (source)
  • One of those quick, elusive smiles played on her lips, as she turned towards the slope.†   (source)
  • This elusive, yet holy core whispers to me of God, of my ability to know and enjoy Him.†   (source)
  • I'm not being elusive; it's just that they wouldn't mean anything to you.†   (source)
  • In our world, Mr. Santos, being elusive is hardly a negative, is it?†   (source)
  • Now try collusion, down deep and elusive and after all these years still breathing, still alive.†   (source)
  • If any communication came from the elusive Treadstone Seventy-One, he wanted to know about it.†   (source)
  • Now, I believed in the elusive promise of the Motherland.†   (source)
  • Elusive, but fascinating.†   (source)
  • The last-Everest-proved elusive, however, and in March 1994 Pittman lost the race to a forty-seven-year-old Alaskan mountaineer and midwife named Dolly Lefever.†   (source)
  • But even though all of that remains elusive, music still keeps his spirit intact, and he doesn't envy Ma, he admires him.†   (source)
  • In some ways the story made less sense each time he read it, the scenes he pictured so vividly, and absorbed so fully, growing more elusive and profound.†   (source)
  • And once again Joel Cairo, the Fat Man, and Brigid O'Shaughnessy, having surreptitiously joined forces, drugged Spade's whiskey and headed for the wharf, their elusive quest finally within reach.†   (source)
  • Bent forward at the waist, groping with both hands, he seemed to be chasing some creature just beyond reach, something elusive, a fish or a frog.†   (source)
  • Not by its rising is there light , Not by its sinking is there darkness Unceasing, continuous It cannot be defined And reverts again into the realm of nothingness That is why it is called the form of the formless The image of nothingness That is why it is called elusive Meet it and you do not see its face Follow it and you do not see its back He who holds fast to the quality of old Is able to know the primeval beginnings Which are the continuity of quality.†   (source)
  • With Sophie at gunpoint across the room, Langdon feared that discovering the cryptex's elusive password would be his only remaining hope of bartering her release.†   (source)
  • But no other man was as elusive either, so that their love never went beyond the point it always reached for him: the point where it would not interfere with his determination to remain free for Fermina Daza.†   (source)
  • But something else too at the edge of it all, at the rim of her vision—and this is what draws her most—an elusive shadow.†   (source)
  • The Abominable Snowman — existing and not existing, flickering at the edges of blizzards, apelike man or manlike ape, stealthy, elusive, known only through rumours and through its backward-pointing footprints.†   (source)
  • But success seemed less elusive.†   (source)
  • Lamia," he said, the cultivated accent still bugging me by its elusiveness, "I need an investigator."†   (source)
  • Within the hour, they would once again experience that intricacy of flavors, that divine distillation, that impression as rich and elusive as— "Good evening, comrade."†   (source)
  • In Bengali class, Gogol is taught to read and write his ancestral alphabet, which begins at the back of his throat with an unaspirated K and marches steadily across the roof of his mouth, ending with elusive vowels that hover outside his lips.†   (source)
  • To intentionally unsteady and upend her, to turn her into a stranger to herself, to heave the weight of doubt on her mind, on all Pari thought she knew of her life, to make her feel as lost as if she were wandering through a desert at night, surrounded by darkness and the unknown, the truth elusive, like a single tiny glint of light in the distance flickering on and off, forever moving, receding.†   (source)
  • She uttered two clearly audible words, familiar and elusive at the same time, words that seemed to have a ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant.†   (source)
  • Your race has been so secretive and so elusive, I must confess, I had not heard tell of Your Highness until this very day.†   (source)
  • It did not seem surprising, all these ghost-ship stories, even if they were only elusive hearsay, because we'd been told the night before that waste is the best-kept secret in the world.†   (source)
  • For him, peace had always been elusive.†   (source)
  • This lack of concern about other people's perceptions requires a confidence that I've always found elusive, and above all else, I envy this about her.†   (source)
  • The elusive harp music sighed and whispered at the edges of his hearing and sent shivers of excitement down his side.†   (source)
  • But they were shut out, listening at a door to words not meant for them: ill-mannered children or stupid servants overhearing the elusive discourse of their elders, and wondering how it would affect their lot.†   (source)
  • He'd searched for hidden passages too, knowing the Spider must have ways of coming and going unseen, but those had proved equally elusive.†   (source)
  • The majority of Aureliano's friends were enthusiastic over the idea of liquidating the Conservative establishment, but no one had dared include him in the plans, not only because of his ties with the magistrate, but because of his solitary and elusive character.†   (source)
  • The pajamas were one of those elusive items that had once been sold by the commissary but then were discontinued.†   (source)
  • They reminded him of something, and increasingly he sensed that the recollection was as important as it was elusive.†   (source)
  • Eragon knew that the elusive shapeshifters would not deign tohelp except in the most desperate of circumstances—they wished to keep their involvement with the Varden a secret from Galbatorix for as long as possible—but he found it heartening to have them so close.†   (source)
  • Then there's the elusive Leonardo.†   (source)
  • Jack Charles, who fought with Ira, recalled how elusive the enemy was: "Though we spent over a month on Bougainville, engaging the enemy in several firefights, while on patrol and on line with the third Marine Division, I can honestly say, few if any of us ever saw a Japanese.†   (source)
  • Now, wide-eyed, he watched the streamers, as beautiful and elusive as butterflies, then pulled himself up on a chair and staggered in pursuit.†   (source)
  • For some elusive reason images of Paris came to him, then the blurred outlines of telephone booths as he and Marie raced from one to another through the blinding Paris streets, making blind, untraceable calls, hoping to unravel the enigma that was Jason Bourne.†   (source)
  • But Hobbits have never, in fact, studied magic of any kind, and their elusiveness is due solely to a professional skill that heredity and practice, and a close friendship with the earth, have rendered inimitable by bigger and clumsier races.†   (source)
  • But, in traveling from a blighted urban terrain to Ivy League distinction, and then in taking some early steps toward professional success, he's earned insights about himself, race, class, hope, faith, and the elusive "unseen," that exceed even the most wild imaginings of the gangly sixteen-year-old I met in the hallways of Ballou High School in 1994.†   (source)
  • …then living out her years in hopeless longing, accepting, as relief for an unhealing wound, some moments of weary affection, plus the tenet that love is futile and happiness is not to be found on earth-Francisco, struggling in the elusive fog of a counterfeit reality, his life a fraud staged by the two who were dearest to him and most trusted, struggling to grasp what was missing from his happiness, struggling down the brittle scaffold of a lie over the abyss of the discovery…†   (source)
  • On the other side of the aisle, dressed for the boardroom of a Fortune 500 company, was the small man with an elusive face.†   (source)
  • It came and went, like some inner dialogue he was conducting that ran parallel to the spoken lines, a thing of elusive drift.†   (source)
  • Holding his breath, mentally reaching for the elusive connection that would make sense of these things, Joe realized that the shell-cracking insight was receding.†   (source)
  • Once he began he couldn't stop, any more than he could stop rain, the stream running down the mountainside, or the fish, persistent and elusive as memory, flashing beneath the ice across the stream.†   (source)
  • Your language is elusive.†   (source)
  • The reference remained elusive until he had gotten into the car and started the engine—and then he recalled the dead-blue eyes of the last corpse that he had seen on a morgue gurney, the night he walked away from crime reporting forever.†   (source)
  • Two brilliant legal minds, both with an elusive connection to a woman and her two children, and Paris thought I was you.†   (source)
  • No loitering in public where he might be spotted, no rented cars that could be traced, no frantic searches for elusive taxis.†   (source)
  • It may be elusive or hidden.†   (source)
  • The power of an event can flow from its unresolvable heart, all the cruel and elusive elements that don't add up, and it makes you do odd things, and tell stories to yourself, and build believable worlds.†   (source)
  • The Elusive Yet Holy Core.†   (source)
  • Of course the film was strange at first, elusive in its references and filled with baroque apparitions and hard to adapt to—you wouldn't want it any other way Overcomposed close-ups, momentous gesturing, actors trailing their immense bended shadows and there was something to study in every frame, the camera placement, the shapes and planes and then the juxtaposed shots, the sense of rhythmic contradiction, it was all spaces and volumes, it was tempo, mass and stress.†   (source)
  • Cain is elusive, the woman far less so.†   (source)
  • … What in God's name does a dead scumball and the world's most elusive assassin "You weren't here a few minutes ago, Steve," again Casset answered quietly.†   (source)
  • That's an elusive reply.†   (source)
  • But the victory, if one could call it that, was ephemeral and elusive, a brief and strident shout atop a mountain that was more noise than substance, more smoke than flames.†   (source)
  • This was as true now as it had been on that first night weeks ago in Yetta's hallway when, as he stormed at Sophie and taunted me about lynchings and snarled "Cracker" in my face, I had caught a glimpse in his fathomless eyes of a wild, elusive discord that sent icewater flooding through my veins.†   (source)
  • And alcohol brought the same relief to poor farmers and crabbers that it brought to emperors; its particular, elusive magic could dull the cumulative effects of being poor, jobless, isolated, and frustrated.†   (source)
  • These held, if George remembered correctly, some fifteen thousand volumes-almost everything of importance that had ever been published on the nebulous subjects of magic, psychic research, divining, telepathy, and the whole range of elusive phenomena lumped in the category of paraphysics.†   (source)
  • Once, I think it was sherry that time, I developed the theory that the fastest and most elusive animals in the world are bats.†   (source)
  • …or neighborhood, but in the delightful and haphazard way of those romantic strangers of Hollywood daydreams, those lovers-to-be whose destinies became intertwined from the first twinkling of their chance encounter: John Garfield and Lana Turner, for instance, utterly doomed from the instant of their mingled glance in a roadside café, or, more whimsically, William Powell and Carole Lombard on hands and knees at the jeweler's, their skulls colliding as they search for an elusive diamond.†   (source)
  • He sifted the mind's trinkets, searching for one elusive.†   (source)
  • It was something elusive, something faint and fragrant that I could not name.†   (source)
  • He could not talk about this thing, so elusive it was" and yet he acted upon it every living second.†   (source)
  • He had asked her before, but somehow the thought was too elusive.†   (source)
  • The savor was slender, elusive, and recondite, a ghostly bouquet that haunted rather than lived on the tongue.†   (source)
  • But this woman who stood before me was my aunt, my mother's sister, Granny's daughter; in her veins my own blood flowed; in many of her actions I could see some elusive part of my own self; and in her speech I could catch echoes of my own speech.†   (source)
  • She was as lithe and yielding to his sustaining hand as a willow rod—she was bird-swift, more elusive in repose than the dancing water-motes upon her face.†   (source)
  • Humbly now, with no vaultingdream of achieving a vast unity, I wanted to try to build a bridge of words between me and that world outside, that world which was so distant and elusive that it seemed unreal.†   (source)
  • Also they made more grotesque an already grotesque and elusive individuality.†   (source)
  • His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders.†   (source)
  • She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name.†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)