Making an explicit comparison with words such as "like" and "as" is called a simile. Novelist Raymond Chandler's similes are rightly famous: "A white night for me is as rare as a fat postman" is detective Philip Marlowe's way of saying he almost never suffers from insomnia. "I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split" shows how out of place Marlowe felt in an exclusive gated community.
Ignorance of Soviet-Armenian composer Aram Khatchaturian is no barrier to understanding Raymond Chandler's opinion of his music: "At 3 a.m. I was walking the floor listening to Khachaturian working in a tractor factory. He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it." Metaphors make the unfamiliar familiar by implicit comparison. More people have heard the sound of a loose fan belt; imagining the din of a tractor factory is within reach for most. Thus, the reader concludes that Khachaturian's violin concerto does not provide a pleasant listening experience.
Applying human qualities to inanimate objects, things or ideas is personification. Mother Nature, the mother country, mother earth are all examples of personification. Raymond Chandler could have said that time passed quietly, but the idea comes across when he writes "The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips." Time doesn't have toes, fingers or lips, but personification allows the writer to draw our attention with his show of skill.
Using words to mean more or less than their surface, literal reading is a figure of speech. A parable also is a form of nonliterary language usage but on the scale of an entire story with a very particular meaning or moral. The dictionary narrowly defines the word neighbor, but the parable of the Good Samaritan extends the definition beyond mere location into the reality of personal morality and ethics. Parables draw the reader's attention and curiosity much as figures of speech do. Their somewhat obscure meanings provoke discussion.