Figurative language is the opposite of literal language. Literal language says exactly what it means. ("That is a big red gumball" is literal.) Figurative language doesn't say exactly what it means. Instead, it relates unrelated things to give you an idea of how someone experienced or perceived something. ("That gumball looks like a clown's nose" is figurative.)
In Chapter 7 of Bud, Not Buddy, there are several examples of figurative language. In this chapter, Bud...
Figurative language is the opposite of literal language. Literal language says exactly what it means. ("That is a big red gumball" is literal.) Figurative language doesn't say exactly what it means. Instead, it relates unrelated things to give you an idea of how someone experienced or perceived something. ("That gumball looks like a clown's nose" is figurative.)
In Chapter 7 of Bud, Not Buddy, there are several examples of figurative language. In this chapter, Bud walks into the library. When he's describing the air in the library, he uses a kind of figurative language called a simile when he says, "…it feels like you're walking into a cellar on a hot July day." Obviously, a library is not the same as a cellar. But the simile gives you a clear feeling of what the experience of walking into the library was like for Bud.
Bud uses another simile when he talks about how people look when they start to fall asleep in the library. He wants to describe the way their heads move. If he wanted to be literal, he'd say something dull like "their heads move up and down." Instead, he compares the way the people's heads move to an unrelated thing when he says "…their heads start bouncing up and down like they're bobbing in a big tub of water for apples."
Similes (which often compare two things using the word "as" or "like," as in the examples above) are just one kind of figurative language.
You can read more about figurative language
You can also discover more types of figurative language (beyond similes)
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