Imbedded semicolon breaks insert statement -- why?

If I do something like:

create table foo (

   id integer,
   text varchar2(2000)
);

insert into foo values (
1, 'this is a very long string
which wraps around several lines;
in fact, three of them');

I get a syntax error when I feed it to sqlplus. Apparantly, what's going on is the ";" imbedded in the text field makes sqlplus think the statement is terminated. I would have thought the quotes would protect it. According to the Oracle SQL Reference, the only character which needs to be escaped inside a quoted string is a quote.

Two questions:

1. Is this really an error, or is sqlplus broken?
2. Regardless of the answer to the above, what's the best way around the problem? The sql files in question will be machine generated, so it has to be something that's easy to generate mechanically.